Re:Stu Ungar
by confidantlake on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @07:43PM
(#21132098)
I may be misunderstanding what you are saying. Are you saying Ungar needs to to win more than 50% to profitably call? That seems incorrect. There is no situation between 2 players where you need to be right more than 50% of the time. Even if there was only 1 chip in the middle and your opponent bet 100 chips, you would still only need to win slightly less than 50% of the time. If there are 100 chips in the middle and your opponent bets 100 chips, you only need to be right 33% of the time.
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Re:Stu Ungar
by yellowstuff on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @12:14PM
(#21138083)
You're correct that I made a dumb mistake. In a tournament we want to calculate our EV in dollars of expected payout, not in chips. Here's the math I should have done:
1) Ungar folds, he is left with about half the chips in play, so about 50% odds of winning the tournament, and EV of ~$50K.
2) Ungar calls and is right, winning $100k.
3) Ungar calls and is wrong. I forgot that he'd still have chips left and assumed that this scenario was worth $0. In fact he'll have ~20% of the chips in play left, which is worth $20K intuitively but can be confirmed here: https://www.icmpoker.com/icmcalculator/
So if Ungar calls he needs to be right X% such that
$50K = $100K * X% + $20K * (1-X%)
X ~= 38%