[ymu]

E2A: In addition to losing the 30% of tournies where we never double up (EV=$0) we also lose the large percentage of tournies where we don't manage to double up until later when we're shorter-stacked relative to the blinds - while it's possible to do well from this position, we're much more likely to be crawling ITM or bubbling if we've been struggling to keep a shortstack alive.

If 15% of the field get paid and our hero cashes considerably more frequently than the average player and/or finishes higher when he does cash such that he earns an average of 4 buy-ins over all tournaments - eliminating the 30% + ?% of tournaments where he never doubled up or only managed it as a micro stack later on ...that really does suggest that expectation could more than double.

It seems much much more likely that LAGs could get a more than doubling of $EV compared to TAGs. The LAGs game is high variance, and as long as he has a +EV skill level the high variance is exactly what will get you the money in an MTT. Depending on the payout structure, you need to crawl into the money 10 times or more in order to get anywhere close to a single win or couple of high finishes. The LAG tries to eliminate those unprofitable crawl into the money finishes by taking risks to get a big stack in return for also busting out more often. It'd be interesting to see the stats for someone like Ted Forrest in terms of double up early% vs donk out early% and crawl into the money vs make the final table.

I'm sure this could be done with a computer simulation - different playing styles, %VPIP and skill edges to model what happens to a chipstack over time and what the final cash outcomes are. It'd be really interesting to compare a LAG style - smaller edges applied more often - against a TAG - bigger edges applied less often (preferably also modelling propensity to get called, I guess).