[MLG]

Baltostar,
I see you consistently conflating two similar, but crucially different ideas.

1. People scale up varience at every perceived +EV opportunity. Which I interpret to mean that people think that simply increasing their varience will increase their EV. You are saying, this is not the case. I agree, people can often get way too caught up and being aggro and throwing chips around, and that many times it does not increase their EV nearly as much as they expect it to.

2. A player should sacrifice his EV in order to reduce variance. This is almost always a huge mistake. And is always a huge mistake early in a tournament. That debate as has been pointed out to you has been held frequently here over the years (if you look in the archives and anthology you will see me consistently arguing my case over and over and over again). There are lots of reasons for this. While the mathematical arguments you state are true, the fact remains that the impact on strategy early in a tournament is so small as to be negligible.


I will say one other thing, and I think it may be the point you are getting at. For a long time, players in MTTS by and large were bad in a very specific way. They were weak tight, especially when faced with a decision for all their chips. Therefore playing in a manner which increased your own varience almost definitionally increased your EV. That in my opinion is no longer the case. That doesnt mean that you should turn down EV ever, it just means that increasingly the most EV strategy may not be the most aggresive one.