Effect of high ROI on decisions early in a tournament
Posted by thereheis
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thereheis
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High Stakes
Effect of high ROI on decisions early in a tournament
Suppose you're one of the best players in level 1 of a long structure MTT with a soft field. For instance, the WSOP main event.
From looking at marketplace markups and consulting a couple of friends who are knowledgeable on the subject, I think the best (maybe top 5%) of players in a tournament like this are achieving 50-100% ROIs.
There are two effects on $EV vs. cEV that I can think of when facing high variance spots early in tournaments:
Effect 1: Diminishing marginal value of chips (i.e. you wouldn't voluntarily take a flip for your stack level one, all other things equal, because chips 0-30,000 are worth more than chips 30,000-60,000)
There are points in a tournament where the marginal value of chips can change, like if you have a chance to accumulate a big stack approaching the bubble, but I'm only talking about early on.
Effect 2: ROI / skill level
Here's a completely different reason you wouldn't take a flip the first hand of the tournament if you have a positive ROI. I will illustrate with a hypothetical situation:
2 handed $1000 SNG, winner take all, no rake
Blinds are 5/10 and never change, stacks are 100,000,000
player a +20% ROI ($EV = $1200)
player b -20% ROI ($EV = $800)
On the first hand player b goes all in in the small blind and shows AsKs
Player a is in the big blind with JJ. Even though JJ has 54%, player a should still fold because .54*2000 = $1080, less than his $EV if he folds down to 99,999,990 chips.
My point in making this post is to ask how can we quantify the ROI effect early in big MTTs for allin decisions? As a player with a 50% ROI, you really don't want to be in spots where you risk all of your chips even if you have the best of it, but where do you draw the line?
The most I can conclude from this right now is that it is extremely beneficial to avoid huge pots early unless your cEV on the play is ridiculously high.
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There is a chicken-and-egg situation here, isn't it? Let's say you are a new player unaware of your tournament ROI and you happily take all +cEV flips in the early stages. After a while of this, you average some ROI x.
Now you start declining early flips where your ROI is less than x if you fold and play on. But your tournament ROI was built partly by taking all these flips earlier, so what is it when you start folding them?
Let's say that x = +50%. if you require your early preflop all-ins to have at least that ROI, you will need 75% preflop to get all-in (0.75 x 2 x stack = 1.5 x stack). So you will almost never do it. So your ROI will drop significantly. Right?
Should we care about busting early at all as long as we are taking +cEV decisions? Intuitively, I think we should not, since accumulating chips via decisions with positive expectation is how we win tournaments. Correctly identifying +cEV preflop spots is a skill, and if we have it, we gain from using it.
But I think you're asking a good question and I am not totally sure about the most profitable approach myself. The pace of the tournament should matter, too. For example, in Turbos I would not skip any early confrontations where I was certain my cEV was positive.
Another point besides the roi from the +cEV spots early, is the bigger roi you'll have if you double up and play a deeper stack throughout the tournament. Nowadays people react well accordingly to nash ranges, but you can still play exploitatively with a deeper stack. So yea, I have worried about this point too, but today I don't think this is as relevant as I thought.
Thanks for the reply.
I hadn't really thought about the first part of what you said, but I think everything in your post has to do with the pace of the tournament. The faster pace of the tournament / the shorter the stack sizes, the smaller the effect of future ROI becomes on your decisions.
I don't think anyone can debate that in the hypothetical situation in my OP, player a should pass on the 54% allin. But that is an extreme situation, and even the slowest real MTTs don't get anywhere near that slow.
I still intuitively don't think you can take a JJ vs. face up AKs allin level 1 of the WSOPME with 50% ROI. Assuming the allin is for 30000 chips, your cEV is +2400 on the play. 54% of the time you double and you can do a little more than you could with 30000, but 46% of the time you're out and you are denying yourself all those little opportunities in 4000 chip pots against bad players.
I think I'm even more confused now.
Agree on your hypothetical example. But rarely, if ever, can we be certain what our equity is in an all-in spot. However, a strong player will be able to identify many situations where he can:
1) Make a good laydown vs a tight player
2) Get the money in very good against a loose player
So instead of getting an average flip with a thin edge vs the field, using some reasonable stackoff default, the strong player will be able to divide such spots more finely into clear folds and clear stackoffs. Hence passing on some flips, not because they are marginal, but because they are clearly losing.
For such small edges in deeper tournaments, with a weak field, yea, it is a must to pass these spots. The point I defended wasn't so extreme.
I think most of MTT grinders share the same thoughts as yours. That's why people often advise to play tighter the early stages, controlling the size of the pot and etc, because of all the reasons you explained here. It really doesn't worth taking a flip for your tournament life when a double up in the early stages is not gonna give you a big advantage on the rest of the field. You should be willing to take those spots when a double up would really increase your chances of making the FT/winning the tournament, which is the middle/final stage. But that everybody knows so...I don't know why you are confused
I think a good way to approximate is the following scenario:
look at your Tracker for the all in adj bb/100 for your stack size and buy in.
Look at how many hands you play in average with this stack left and with a similar structure.
Calculate the Chips all in adj you should made from now.
calculate loosing these chips too the equation.( just if broking obv)
This sounds harder as it is. Pokertracker has pretty good filters for things like this. But this can help you to approximate situation like this and i really dont know a better way to do it. And if you have done it once you will get a feeling for it.
Of course the points that Zenfish makes is very true and your sample might be biased. So therefore we could try to filter the all in adj bb/100 value without all in situation. And then look for o middle value of this two values. Yes the second one is biased too, because not every all in situation is a flip. But all we try to do is to get a good approximation of the correct decision. Therefore is this post. I dont really know if its needed to do these flips or better not to. I hope someone helps this approach
Gambooooooooool
I think the main idea, which I agree with in tournaments that are well structured and you have a high bb/100, you don't want to risk busting the tournament on a marginal high variance spot, and I completely agree with that. However if you keep passing up profitable shoves and calls you will get punished, as a result, I would recommend playing around with HRC see how much you are making with all your hands and than use that guide decision making, try to quantify what your min edge should be for calling/shoving a spot, and that way you can be precise and say I'm folding hand X, even though calling is worth 0.01bb because its not worth the risk.
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