[Mason Malmuth]

Hi David:

Snyder did indeed write the above, and then he went on to elaborate this way:

[ QUOTE ]
We saw a perfect example of this in a televised final table a few years back, when Paul Phillips and Dewey Tomko were heads up at the end, with Phillips holding most of the chips and Tomko extremely short-stacked. Hand after hand, Dewey Tomko pushed all-in, doing his best to give himself at least a coin-flip chance of winning. Unfortunately for him, Paul Phillips had so many chips that he didn’t have to flip coins. He just let Dewey take the blinds until he found a premium starting hand, then he called Dewey’s all-in bet. It’s not a coin-flip situation if one player is betting everything on any two random cards and the other player is playing selective strong hands. Dewey had almost no chance of winning this tournament against Phillips’ strategy. And I’m not criticizing Tomko’s all-in-on-every-hand strategy. In fact, with his desperately short chip stack, this was his most intelligent strategy. He knew he had second-place prize money locked up if he ended up with zero chips, and he knew his short stack chips weren’t worth squat. But he had no intention of waiting for premium cards—a strategy that would almost invariably lead him to going out with a whimper. He could not afford to give up the blinds, nor could he afford to play poker. His chips had no utility value at all, and the poker skills he possessed were crippled without the chips to play.

[/ QUOTE ]

Best wishes,
Mason