M, Q, D

[dfwdevil]

What I'm concerned with in a tourney, when it comes to an all-in decision that will potentially send me to the rail, is this: is it worth taking a 60% the best of it here for my whole stack? If I go all-in as a 60-40 favorite four times, and someone has me covered each time, my chances of going to the rail are a whopping 87%. If I go all-in as an 80-20 favorite five times, then 68% of the time, I'm gone. Bye bye.

Obviously you can't win tourneys by avoiding good situations, but the question I'm posing is whether you can avoid some of them. Consider that the punishment for going all-in and losing before the money is always the same. Doom. Tournament death, unless you're in a rebuy. So the "risk" portion of the equation never changes, but the "reward" does. A successful all-in in the opening stages of a tourney will net you a few thousand chips at most; whereas a successful all-in in the later stages can position you for the final table; and a successful all-in at the final table can mean a lot of money indeed.

That is to say, those later all-ins are substantively better bets. You stand more to gain, for the same amount of risk. Put another way, if you're going to risk your tourney life, prefer to do it for big pots, preferably the kind of pots that can make or break you. It's better to burn out than to fade away, or, as Sam Farha would say, "in order to live, you've got to be willing to die."

Anyway, D is a way of expressing this. It's nothing new. Just the ratio of a) the average final-table stack to b) the size of your expected net from the current pot. If the average stack at the FT is going to be 1,000,000 chips, and you find yourself playing a pot which if you win will net you 20,000 chips, your D is 1,000,000 / 20,000 = 50. A relatively high D which would seem to indicate, don't risk it here, unless your M is low.

Which brings me to my question. Assuming you have a high M (ie, are large stacked relative to the blinds), how important is the hypothetical D? Do you submit to the skewing of chip values enforced by the tourney structure, such that you are frequently folding 60-40s even when you can see your opponent's cards, or do you play straight EV poker and not consider the value of the chips vis a vis what you will realistically need to do well, given the top-heavy tournament structures common nowadays?

Thanks