A5s in blind battle.

[baltostar]

My intention wasn't to coach anyone, per se.

What I am good at is standing on the periphery of something and spotting self-reinforcing patterns that have become an objective unto themselves even as their benefit to the real goals have become marginal or even negative.

It does seem that on these boards the following pattern have pervasively embedded itself:

When directions a hand could go become murky, there is this total concentration of effort on figuring out how play the hand optimally **in the context of that hand only**.

Perhaps it is better in certain hands in which uncertainty regarding how it might play out and associated risk have both suddenly widened well beyond initial expectations to switch gears and play the hand with risk mitigation as the sole objective ?

In most cases, doing so would be EV-, and apparently that's taboo on these boards.

An analogy from trading:

Sometimes a setup looks very solid but once you put the trade on you become aware of small but significant risks that could cause the trade to go wildly wrong.

There is one camp of very good traders who will choose to dynamically respond to the situation as it unfolds, and they are very good at this. But the approach often involves scaling their trade size.

However, there is another camp of very good traders who prefer to immediately hedge out the extreme scenarios they just became aware of, and not touch the trade after that until targets are met. In doing so, they give up a good part of their anticipated profit, but they also avoid outsized risks.

And by doing so in many cases the trade does become relative EV- for them in the sense that its return on capital becomes less than some super-low-risk bread-and-butter trade they can put on at any time.

These tradres know that most likely in the very near future will come comparable setups that very likely will not become an ugly hydra as soon as they put them on. And they know their capital is better utilized on those trades.

[Eagles]

Baltostar,
Risk management is borderline irrelevant in MTTs.

[PrayingMantis]

[ QUOTE ]
Baltostar,
Risk management is borderline irrelevant in MTTs.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are replying to a poster that in a recent thread wrote: "If you don't assign goals to hands, you run the risk of letting a single hand take control of your tournament".

I'm really not interested in the old and rather boring discussion of "ZOMG putting your tourney life on the line!", and of course you should have "goals", or better: "plans" for a hand, but general statements like the above, which baltostar is making again and again and in different ways, are really wrong and misleading, as most of good players know. You cannot, simply cannot, be a significant winner in MTTs if you don't, rather occasionally, "run the risk of letting a single hand take control of your tournament". OF course, strong players know how to pick these hands and spots, bad players don't.

Baltostar's "risk ideas" with regrard to MTTs are much much more relevant to MTT bankroll management than to any specific MTT hand in some random mid-stage spot in a tournament. Taking ideas from trading and artificially implementing them into MTT-poker situations is usually absurd (and again, it's not the first time I'm seeing this phenomenon, which is actually very interesting. "Smart" trading theoreticians who become rather weak-tight poker players, who have tons of "risk management" rationalizations for their play).

Anyway, I wouldn't like balto to stop posting or anything, not at all. If people find his vaguely articulated "ideas" interesting or stimulating, well, great.

[Ship Ship McGipp]

BAaaaLLLLOOOOSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR RRRRR

related to ?

SAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAZZZZZZZZAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR

[Pudge714]

[ QUOTE ]
BAaaaLLLLOOOOSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR RRRRR

related to ?

SAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAZZZZZZZZAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR

[/ QUOTE ]
related to SALAD BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

[baltostar]

[ QUOTE ]
You cannot, simply cannot, be a significant winner in MTTs if you don't, rather occasionally, "run the risk of letting a single hand take control of your tournament". OF course, strong players know how to pick these hands and spots, bad players don't.

[/ QUOTE ]

This isn't really what I'm getting at.

There is a big difference between letting/allowing/being drawn into and pursuing.

If at a time when the pot size implies small-to-moderate damage to your stack, you mis-perceive the risk of stakes-escalation, and you **allow** yourself to be drawn into playing the hand bigger simply because you perceive that it is marginal EV+, you soon may find yourself pot committed in a marginal situation (some combination of marginal hand, marginal read, marginal EV+, etc.)

The above is massively different than **pursuing** a situation where you believe you can escalate the stakes and remain nicely EV+ or even improve your EV+.

That's why I am advocating some sort of warning/alarm system based on reasonable expectations for goals/scenarios. It's all about protecting the player from himself.

[PrayingMantis]

[ QUOTE ]
That's why I am advocating some sort of warning/alarm system based on reasonable expectations for goals/scenarios. It's all about protecting the player from himself.


[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, now I see what you mean: You are the HSMTT messiah, coming here to protect us from ourselves. Thank you, your posts in this thread are perceived as escalating to new boundaries of hilariousness. Please keep it up.

[AceofSpades]

[ QUOTE ]
Baltostar,
Risk management is borderline irrelevant in MTTs.

[/ QUOTE ]

What do you guys think of the idea that certain stack sizes maintain an "x" value in ability to steal chips w/o showdown.

Does maintaining that value versus getting involved in borderline high variance ev+ or ev- situations have merit?

Clearly though this hand villians calling range according to op, is wider than balto assumes.

fwiw I don't really play much higher levels so maybe the edge of gaining chips w/o showdown is smaller at high stakes

Joseph

[MLG]

Balt,
I kind of thought thats where this was going. The idea of turning down risky high EV situations in order to allow yourself to profit from later high EV situations that to entail that level of riskiness in the arena of a poker tournament is generally a bad idea. There is a lot of literature in the archives about it. While you are right that you should be considering exactly how much ev you are gaining my upping your varience, you should very very rarely (especially early in a tournament) be passing up ev to reduce risk.

[registrar]

[ QUOTE ]
While you are right that you should be considering exactly how much ev you are gaining my upping your varience, you should very very rarely (especially early in a tournament) be passing up ev to reduce risk.

[/ QUOTE ]

For really vague reasons that I am unable to articulate in any meaningful way, I think it is possible that the 'passing up small edges' argument needs to be reconsidered in view of the tougher but more standardised fields we have seen over the past year or so.

I also think that many players (or quite possibly only me) become sloppy - assuming that the most +cEV play is the best play. This is obviously usually the case, but not always.

There are a load of tired cliches (tournament life on the line, pick a better spot etc.) that we've all considered many times before. But what I haven't seen discussed, more or less at all, is how the assumptions drawn from the arguments in the archive (don't pass up small edges) are affected by the fact that far more of any given field, certainly on Stars, are more or less competent, less intimidated by a large stack, have less concern for their tournament life but are now exploitable in different ways.

I don't think anything in this thread particularly addresses this, which is a pity.