As per the bigger edges comment:
ME had a few thousand people right? Let's use 4096 because it's a power of 2. It will take winning 12 of these in a row for stacks preflop to win:
.53^12 = 0.049% chance of winning
1/4096 = 0.024% chance of winning
Thus taking this "small" edge actually increases
odds of winning tournament by just over twice. So two people with exactly the same skill set apart from this play the same tournament. One player takes the 53% edges, other doesn't. The one who does has twice as much chance of winning the tournament.
Granted that's nowhere near complicated enough because we have to factor either player losing in the money, but due to the top heavy nature of mtt payouts we should be shooting for #1 anyway right?
The one argument against it would be say you are basically like anyone in the forum. This is simplified but say you had a strategy that would win the $12 million 1% of the time. There is another strategy that will never win and always barely make the money giving say 20k 30% of the time.
Obviously 120k > 6k by a ton. Yet this would be a tough choice for me. If I had millions and millions it would be the easiest choice in the world. As it is now I'd probably lean towards 30% of 20k although I'm not sure. If it was something like 30% at 100k (which still makes 120k > 30k) I'd take the 30% at 100k no question about it even though I'm literally giving up 90k in ev every tournament I play.
Basically I've been watching a few MTT videos over at Stox and this came up in one of the videos. He said that even thinking of folding here would be silly because first off what I said above and second off while you're sitting there waiting for a better edge, over half the time the other guy has twice the chips and is using those to exploit all edges including the big ones you're going to exploit. So you could wait another few hours and finally get that bigger edge and meanwhile he's found a few edges and has doubled up 2-3 times again.
Anyway just curious question, although I still think I'd take the flip. I figure no matter what I do I'm not cashing more than 50% of the time anyway so having less than 50% of busting isn't the end of the world.
But on the other hand for purely entertainment value I'd like to play more than one hand in the WSOP ME.
So I'm pretty sure from a game theory standpoint and pure ev the call is a no brainer. Just curious as to other opinions on this. Also note that if you fold and refuse to take an edge that's not big enough sooner or later you could have like 10 big blinds and be forced to take the 40%.
For those who say fold, what threshold would you need to call? I'm assuming most would insta-call AA vs. AK. Would you call KK vs. AK? AK vs. 78?
edit: fwiw I voted **** tournaments even though I think playing the WSOP ME would be awesome
.