[baltostar]

[ QUOTE ]
baltosar you have the most backward, unintuitive way of thinking of EV as I have ever seen. You should never consider the EV of a hand by the max you "should" be making with it, it is all about making the most you can possibly make given the situation.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wrong and wrong.

You're totally misunderstanding how I look at EV. This is explained in other posts of mine.

I am not advocating artificially constraining one's play in a rigid manner because the stakes escalate outside an avg takedown for a given scenario.

I am advocating using reasonable expectations for various scenarios as a sort of alarm system to warn oneself that you are drifting into murkier and murkier risk-invested waters.

In my experience (which admittedly does not include high-level live play), what prevents very many good players from becoming great players is that they are not very good at perceiving relative risk.

They are good at obtaining an edge in a hand (reading an opponent, tactical play, bet sizing, etc), but they are not good at perceiving that their incurred risk is excessive relative to the avg opp they can expect in their current M-bracket (and other relative opp metrics).

They over-focus on EV+ to the detriment of stack variance control.

Your statement :

"it is all about making the most you can possibly make given the situation"

is an excellent representation of the flawed thinking that I am referring to.

If what you said was correct for tournament play, then why wouldn't one always attempt escalate the stakes to playing for stacks for even the tiniest perceived EV+ ?

When a hand's risk (as measured by stack/pot ratio, or as measured by cost to continue the most EV+ line, or other metrics) moves significantly outside of reasonable expectations for the pre-flop or flop scenario, one should ask themselves the very serious question:

"Do I have exceptional confidence that this is an opportunity significantly better than the avg opp I expect to receive in my current M-bracket ?"