I've seen the above statement mentioned a few times by several contributors to this forum and not wanting to appear stupid I've never questioned it; I just assumed it was a piece of well known TBJ wisdom that I was yet to uncover. So I'm going to bite the bullet now and ask someone to explain the rationale behind this statement because it's not obvious to me. I can see how, in the endgame, losing bets could put you in a position that locks you out of winning or at least seriously jeopardizes your chances. Whereas in that same position, winning your bets won't guarantee victory or anything approaching that. But as a general rule I can't see the logic. Anybody? Yours humbly Reachy
Reachy good point that I also questioned Monkeysystem on, if you check in the thread Tournament strategy with different rules were we are speaking about tournaments where bj pays 2 to 1 he states his case. Joep
Lost Bets Hurt More Than Won Bets Help This idea applies only to the early stages of a tournament round. Later on as Joep says in the other post you are likely to need big bets to win a game. The reason why is the fact that when you run out of chips it's game over. You lose. However, you have no way of knowing how many chips it will take to win the game. It could be many multiples of the starting bankroll. Your starting bankroll is a lot closer to zero than to what it may take to win the game. If you win a big bet early opponents will chase and chances are good some will catch you, so if you win big early bets it's likely the bankroll needed to win the game will be higher than if no one wins big early bets. I can illustrate this theory of lost bets using the most extreme example - the all-in on hand one. If you lose this bet your chances of winning the game are zero. If you win this bet your chances of winning improve, but are certainly not guaranteed. Losing this big bet hurts your chances far more than winning it helps your chances. Indeed, losing it destroys your chances entirely. This effect varies by degrees. If you're one of the players who's mouse pointer is stuck on the split bank button, losing hand one hurts your chances of winning the game a lot. You're very unlikely to win after halving your starting bankroll, though it can happen. If you win the split bank bet you're chances of winning improve, but realistically not very much. Another effect is on games in which it's possible to go all-in. If you have already lost 1/3 of your bankroll because of lost bets then when you need to go all-in you can only end up with 4/3 of your starting bankroll after you win it. If, however, you haven't lost much of your starting bankroll you can potentially nearly double it. The all-in bet, if won, yields a result that's 2/3 of your starting bankroll higher. In other words, every bet you lose in the early hands will cost you double from the results of your all-in bet. The effect is even worse if you luck out and get a BJ from your all-in bet. There is probably some percentage of the max bet small enough so losses don't significantly matter more than wins. It would be interesting to come up with a mathematical solution to this question. I don't have one.
A real life example of early losses hurting is the LV Hilton's tournaments. The $100,000 and $30,000 tournaments have a hand where each player has an Ace as the first card. The hand, between 10 and 20, is determined by random selection before play starts. The vast majority of players now know to bet the max on the hand that will have the Ace as the first card. If you win this hand then you are normally up to par with most of the rest of the table. However, if you lose the hand then you are a severe underdog.
Reachy a good start might be to calculate the odds that if you are BR1, one of the remaining players will swing you - any one of them - versus the odds, if you are BRL - that you can swing all the remaining players - the more you are behind - the harder it gets - the more you are ahead the harder for the other players to swing - but more taking shots at you - I'd rather be ahead - better odds - but not close to a sure thing -
