Does anyone else find that in tournaments that when it comes down to the final two, that it becomes a bit of a coin toss? Especially when the blinds are huge and two big blinds can eat away most of your stack if you fold.

not really. In tournaments, often times there will be someone with a strong chiplead...making it much less of a coin toss. An even if the chips are similar, I find its a more of coin toss if the game ends earlier (IE, both have similar chips, and get good hands quickly, and go all in. Then its like a coin toss), and less of a coin toss as the game wears on (as the chips begin to become uneven)

Almost right...

Let me explain,

When you have almost even strenght opponents (one can be better but not much) and the stack advantage is not over 3 for 1, I think i'ts almost a coin flip.

But when one of the oponent is signifiacantly better or have much more HU experiance, the best player will win 80% of the time... regardless the stack size.

KJ

Originally Posted by KINGJACK

Almost right...

Let me explain,

When you have almost even strenght opponents (one can be better but not much) and the stack advantage is not over 3 for 1, I think i'ts almost a coin flip.

But when one of the oponent is signifiacantly better or have much more HU experiance, the best player will win 80% of the time... regardless the stack size.

KJ

Your last comment is totally wrong.

Given even stacks, by going all in every hand, a player has a 7% chance to win BARE MINIMUM. (If on the first hand he has K2 and the opponent has KK) More than likely, he has a 30-40% chance to win by simply GOING ALL IN EVERY HAND given the high blinds in a late stage tournament. The odds of another player getting AA or KK or QQ or something like that early enough to have only a 85/15 or so edge anyway is very low and most likely he makes a call with a hand like 88 or Ak which is way less than 80/20 over a random hand. I'm sure one can prove that the optimal play against a going all in every hand player when the blinds are x % of the total stacks will only yield something like a 60/40 or 65/35 edge. And this is against a total idiot player.

When you have almost even strenght opponents (one can be better but not much) and the stack advantage is not over 3 for 1, I think i'ts almost a coin flip.

But when one of the oponent is signifiacantly better or have much more HU experiance, the best player will win 80% of the time... regardless the stack size.

Assuming the same skill level between all the players, your chance to win a tournament is the percentage of the chips in the field that you have. When you have two players of similar skill playing HU, a 3-to-1 chip distribution is not even close to a coinflip situation - it is a lot closer to a 3-to-1 situation.

Skill has its place in NLHE, but so does probability/luck. If you started Phil Helmuth with $1,000 and someone like me with $50,000 in a HU match and even gave Phil plenty of time starting with 10/20 blinds, surely you don't think he would come out on top 8 out of 10 matches like that. I could double him up 5 times before I gave up the chip lead, which means I could take shots at him with hands that are 2-to-1 dogs and bust him eventually. Even if we say Phil Helmuth is 50 times better than myself (whatever that means), he's only going to win 5 of our 10 matches (that's also assuming a whole lot of things about a player's relative skill level and how that effects a game of NLHE).

I didn't say it was a valid option, i simply said given an even stack size, even if a player went all in everytime they would not be an 80/20 dog. You mentioned that a better HU player would win 80% regardless of stack size. So I was just presenting an exxample where the best player doesn't even have a stack disadvantage, and the other player plays horribly, and still the best players edge is not even 80/20. That's all. Going all in every hand is far from optimal play against virtually any player and virtually any blind structure.

Originally Posted by KINGJACK

oups... definately...

I still had my 3 to 1 stack advantage and under in mind... (1 allin)

Sorry

Edit... oh reread your post and I cant agree with you... Going all in every hand with a 10:1 stack advanage could be a valid option but 50/50 is ridicoulous.

And if you do it you cant win 50% of the time!?!?!?!?!?

KJ