Your edge in this tournament is high enough to pass up this small edge.

Your edge in the tournament comes from recognizing and taking edges like this one. Easy call from a math perspective, and assuming that your opponents are all on tight, high card ranges. On the other hand, as somebody pointed out upthread, most players have some +life EV from the experience of playing this particular tournament that exceeds what can be found in almost any other tournament, and I don't think it's completely wrong to take that into account.

This would be a trivially easy call in the first hand of a $1 tournament online, because **** it, I'll start another. It would be a lot harder to pull the trigger in the ME, not least because I don't have 10k to spend for a cool story about how I busted in the first hand of the ME with 76s.

If a significant portion of your edge comes from making plays that are marginally +EV then you're a break even player.

If you feel that you're better than 1:4 to quadruple up, then you have to fold. If you don't then you shouldn't be playing in this tournament.

In one of his articles Bond18 talks about people "waiting for better spots" to be incorrect in not taking any +ev spots offered.

He says that if in the first hand of a tourney it was folded to the sb and they shoved and turned over AKs, and he had 22, he MIGHT possibly fold if he was better than virtually everyone in the field.

In other words, he MAY POSSIBLY not risk a 52/48 if he's theb est player in the tournament. I think that says it all.

Tournament poker is the accumulation of +ev spots and if pokerstove says 23% when 20% is breakeven (getting 4 to 1), instashove imo.

Right but you're taking an unnecessary risk not justified by the return. If you start with 10k, this edge is worth like 500 chips. I would imagine that you could expect to find a greater edge with less of a risk, especially with the structure of the Main Event.

I understand EV and I see where you're coming from here. You're EV calculation is obv. flawed in that it is not taking into account you're personal skill level vs. you're competition EV. You would need to find a way to combine the EV of the individual hand, w/the EV of you're skill set to find whether or not this play is truly EV.

Also I think that you are not taking into account that the call would be +EV over an infinite # of hands, and that you are going to come no where near reaching an infinite # of large money buy-ins in you're career.

Only the eleventy-billionth "what if" ME situation....

I highly doubt anyone here actually MAKES the call if they were there in the flesh and in that situation, regardless of the math.

Ban for not including AA on the first hand.

I would not call because your chance of doubling up without it is probably >70%.

And he is so right about this. This is one of my favorite posts, and I argue that if you think you are better than half the field, you should not take an even money flip.

I love this question by RG. It's crucial to tourney poker.

In any tourney it is mathematically correct to call, but I think RG is better than 3/4 of the field, regardless of his preferred stakes. My guess is about 1500 pros, and 5000 ex-athletes, rich weekend hacks, tv actors, and dreamers. I think it'd be easy to collect chips against them.