EdmondDantes says

This is a great post and highly topical. I'm not sure any of us will live long enough to let the variance sort itself out. Sure, if you're 10-tabling small $ STTs 5-6 days per week you might have shot at seeing your expectation and real profit intersect, but in live tournaments? Chop and move on!

Most people don't seem to factor in things like the potential for "utter monkey tilt" you reference (I'd pay to see that, btw), the opportunity cost of time, the time it takes to get EV and actual profit to coincide, taxes and how hard it is to actually make money elsewhere. They also tend to overestimate their skill and misjudge their bankroll vs the number of times they'll actually find themselves in a FT situation.

If you're a trader on Wall Street finding and pushing small edges daily, you're going to size your trades and position relative to the capital you can put at risk. If there's a 55/45 edge that you can hammer repeatedly with a small amount of capital relative to your firm's total bankroll, you'd do it and be paid well for it. But if you put the firm's entire balance sheet at risk on a similar one-time proposition, you'd be labeled an idiot and chased from the Street in shame, regardless of outcome.

We ran out a number of scenarios as a 65/35 favorite here Variance - The Grossness of Poker. The range of actual vs. expected results is pretty unnerving for guys trying to make a living playing.

As for the suck-outs, I think it's great that you're admitting you needed them in your biggest wins. Everyone pretty much acknowledges they needed to "get lucky" to win a big MTT event. In effect, they're admitting that they can and did make big mistakes while playing and a huge chunk of their MTT winnings resulted from an opportune card. That's an encouraging but sobering thought for those playing for a living.

Ergo: don't let your ego preclude you from taking a chop when you can!

Edmond

P.S. If you're interested in reading about guys who overestimate their skill and underestimate variance in size, try these...

Fooled by Randomness
When Genius Failed

06/21/07

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It turns out I had just enough time to go to the Rio and play one satellite, which I won outright. I'd asked for a chop twice - once at 100/200 when I had 6K/big stack 11K/shortie 3K, and again just before the final hand at 200/400, when it was 4K/8K/8K. Both times, the big stack refused; after the second time, the shortie wound up pushing AJ into the big stack's AK when, as it turns out, I had kings. Ballgame, ship the 5 grand, etc.

This makes me want to post about making deals in general. Most of the "A+" online elite either don't make deals at all or won't accept anything that isn't wildly in their favor. When I'm playing my best, I think I'm up there, and I definitely don't give up much in shorthanded tournament situations (my final table record proves it) - but I definitely do make deals, and in fact, will sometimes take slightly the worst of it (giving up a couple of percentage points, though not more) to make one stick. Two or three thousand dollars is significant to me, but it's not a huge number or anything. And yet, I'd probably be okay with giving up some fraction of a c-note to take it down.

Why is this? I think most of the pros around the net these days greatly underestimate variance. I'll fess up right now and say that two thirds of my net profit last year came from a whopping one tournament. So did Nath's. Taking the first couple of 2+2'ers that come to mind, after making his deal for 400K 3 handed at the WSOP, Jurollo's going to be around there, as well; Rizen is an absolutely ridiculous tournament player, but does anyone think he made more than 500K last year if you don't include his WSOP result? Gobboboy's second place is probably pushing 80% of his roll...etc., etc., etc.

All of these big wins have one thing in common - suckouts. I had 3 big ones in mine. Gobboboy hit a one outer (among many others) in his, Nath, Jurollo and Rizen doubtless had quite a few, and so on. Even playing your best, it's very difficult to play so well or get hit by the deck so hard that you never get your chips in while behind. What's important about this is that it only takes one time where your 25% or 33% shot doesn't hold up to turn 2/3 of your profit for the year into a loss. You can argue that in the long run, that's irrelevant, because even tournaments full of suckouts factor into a good player's expectation, but the long run in poker is somewhere between the cockroaches inheriting the Earth and the Sun going supernova; in addition, there's no such thing as a tournament these days where shorthanded play doesn't consist of "push top X%, get called by top Y%". I firmly believe that when you get to a final table and are in line for a significant payout, you should do what you can to lock it up, rather than winding up in a "who can run the hottest 3 handed with 20 BB" game. Of course, this doesn't apply when you have a significant edge, but those aren't that easy to come by - and are somewhat cancelled out by the utter monkey tilt that I'd go on if I passed up a huge deal and then lost a coinflip.

The A+ league, especially the 18-22 crowd, has an easier time ignoring variance than I do. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't care about money management anyway, which is actually an advantage in nosebleed stakes poker. I, on the other hand, do care about money, and I have to admit this causes me to give up a step to guys like sbrugby that have no problem with dropping 1 million a week. Maybe I'll get to be enough of a degenerate gambler to stop caring about that, but I'm okay with where I am for now...and it sure looks to me like chopping tournaments, especially with short stacks in the endgame, is a much better idea than playing them out*.

*of course, if you're playing live and they don't call with a push with anything but aces, it's another story.