[baltostar]

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]


My points are not easy to explain, not by anyone. They are not boring deja-vu. I seriously doubt that my main point has been discussed on these forums before.

(Note to PrayingMantis: 2004 might as well have been 1904. The player ecosystem of the online game has radically changed since 2004. In online poker, you can't just stuff something in a drawer and consider it a done deal.)

My main point probably does arise from the major "added LAG" in today's online opponents. (From what from what I've read this has led to a number of high-profile previously very successful online cash game players going broke).

It's not just "added LAG". It's also the growing number of tricky snipers that are out there who are very good at setting-up good players' whose bread-and-butter is scaling stakes to scare out weak-tight players.

I'm working on a math proof that cEV+ is not always $EV+. But I am not a mathematician so maybe I don't achieve the rigor required by a proof. In any case, I'm going to post it in the theory forum, not here, because it is far from the main jist of my arguments. It is not what I started arguing, it was a tangent.

My main point (on this and other threads) continues to be that there is a pervasive persistent tendency on these boards to analyze hands to pursue EV+ lines without appropriate consideration of whether the likely incurred variance is worth it.

Apparently, at lot of you seem to think I'm arguing that there's some absolute amount of variance that should be avoided as some sort of function of the amount of EV+ of a line.

Not really.

I am arguing that within an M-bracket you can expect an avg opp. And it is easy to be drawn into (as in "draw yourself into") pursuing a below-avg opp without properly considering how likely the stakes are to scale.

Once you have become committed to a line, it is usually too late to back out.

If you consistently are willing to scale the stakes for below-avg opps you are playing sub-optimally. The degree to which you are willing to add variance should probably be in linear proportion to the difference of the opp's EV and avg opp's EV (for the current M-bracket). Maybe it's a more complex function than linear, I don't know yet.

I don't think this is occurring in today's good players' play by only a small measure. I think it is a very serious leak that will only become of greater impact to bankrolls as the game continues to get tougher.

I also think that within the next year successful, well-known players will be writing about it, maybe even publishing books about it, and it will become a huge topic in today's game.

You can make fun of me all you want because I am not a proven high-stakes MTTs player. But the fact is that I have a long life/career history of observing group behavior from the periphery and being very good at spotting detrimental patterns of thought that participants have unwittingly locked themselves into.