[baltostar]

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But early in a tournament, if you are faced with an all-in bet with an expected return of 1 chip, then you almost certainly should take it. Losing your stack is not the big a deal (most tournaments you lose your stack with no gain). Doubling up early is huge, and can have a large positive influence on the EV of future hands. In tournaments, variance is your friend even when it threatens your entire stack.

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Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Completely utterly wrong. Wrong.

For lack of a better name, I dub this the "Greg Raymer school of EV+" and it is wrong.

I engaged a super smart poker player friend of mine in this argument and I played devil's advocate.

The way this line goes is you should never pass up EV+ because there's always another tournament.

His response was, "Yeah but there's not an infinite amount of time in your life and most of us don't have an infinite amount of money."

That statement effectively kills the argument for absolute chip gain. More precisely, your time and bankroll risk to play in a tournament is worth more than 0.1% EV+

And here's what kills the argument for stack utility gain :

Utility/chip is an inverse function of stack size. (Sklansky was the first to prove this: if you accumulate 100% of tournament chips you do not receive 100% of buy-ins as your prize).

Obviously, your stack as a whole does gain utility from an early double-up, but it's less than double the utility of your original stack. If you're only 0.1% EV+ to double-up you are overpaying for the expected utility gained.