I was playing in a tournament tonight and the situations lead me to question my strategy. So I'll pose a similar question for you (simplified from my situation). Assume standard online EBJ format. Two players remain at the final table. It is the 19th hand of 25. BR1 acts first (and will therefore act first on final hand). Both players have secret bet. BR1 - 26000, bet 2000 you - 23000 My question is this, do you make a catch-up bet of 5500 or greater now, or bet min and bide your time? If you'd make the catch-up bet here, how big would BR1 have to bet to make you want to take the low instead? If you would not make the bet here, how small would BR1 have to bet to make you do it? I ran into a situation similar to this one and decided to bide my time. I ended up having to make a catch-up bet of about 14000, so I bet max and went broke. If I'd done it sooner I would have had more than one chance. However, in an equal number of games BR1 will lose and shrink the deficit, so perhaps I played it correctly. I'm curious as to your thoughts.
I like to wait. If you both lose, you will be down by 1/3 of your stack. Suppose you bet 6000 knownig you'll go all in after another loss. A win on any of these hands may give you a 500 lead with half a week to go. When you waited the 25000 bet to cover a 14000 defecit should have yielded a big lead.
