You are in the second hour of a tournament. You have a below average stack. Time to gamble? Often the answer will be no.The software tells us the average stack. So when we fall below it we might implement the gamble more in big pots scenario. However, most players that reach mid-point are below average. Looking at the leader board we will see a group with very large stacks. These lucky folks skew things. The top group will have changed the dynamics. It isn’t an unusual occurrence in tournaments.
Where is your stack in relation to those left? Often that below average stack has you at or near the middle mark or maybe around upper third. With mid-game blinds you’ll often have a stack that has a reasonable M. [ M= Stack / (Blinds + Ante)]
So, review the dynamics more closely than just following the average stack info. In big stack tournaments this can be magnified. On sites that have smaller starting stacks the below average problem is likely to be more real.
It is easy for the dynamics to be skewed. JBHarshaw has an article up that I mentioned in my last blog. He’s discussed it a bit with me. It covers the WSOP’s dynamics. Last year I followed the chip counts and hand histories. Cardplayer wasn’t giving the blinds in the earlier tournaments and I remarked to Felicia that I thought the pros were on locoweed from some of the early play. When they finally started putting up the blind info, what looked like reasonable stacks that were overplaying hands were, in fact, playing responsibly. Well, read JB’s article and you’ll find last year was tame.
If you look on Fuel55′s blog you’ll see the info on the tournament that got him his seat in the big one. He secured that seat with 9+ hours of play. That was a tournament with a lot of play provided. When he was ‘below average’