Playing in a VP tournament where the game is 9/5 DDB Highest score
wins from both sessions and each session is 1000 credits. I have two
questions on what would be the best hold.
1) You are dealt 2,2,K,K,5 - do you hold the two pair or go for the
possible set of 2's with a kicker?
2) You are dealt K,A,J,Q,4 (only the KQ is suited)...do you go for a
flush or two card royal or do you hold for the straight?
Any advice from any tournament pros?
Bob Dancer has some articles on tournament play. Usually you have to be more aggressive than normal strategy, unless you're in the lead in which case you can be a little more conservative. In this case, I would say go for the quads and royals. It depends how many people you're competing against too.
missdeuces <missdeuces@yahoo.com> wrote: Playing in a VP tournament where the game is 9/5 DDB Highest score
wins from both sessions and each session is 1000 credits. I have two
questions on what would be the best hold.
1) You are dealt 2,2,K,K,5 - do you hold the two pair or go for the
possible set of 2's with a kicker?
2) You are dealt K,A,J,Q,4 (only the KQ is suited)...do you go for a
flush or two card royal or do you hold for the straight?
Any advice from any tournament pros?
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Thanks for the reply. It seems that you are the only one that
offered any help.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, John Douglass <john.douglass@...>
wrote:
Bob Dancer has some articles on tournament play. Usually you have
to be more aggressive than normal strategy, unless you're in the
lead in which case you can be a little more conservative. In this
case, I would say go for the quads and royals. It depends how many
people you're competing against too.
missdeuces <missdeuces@...> wrote: Playing in a VP tournament
where the game is 9/5 DDB Highest score
wins from both sessions and each session is 1000 credits. I have
two
questions on what would be the best hold.
1) You are dealt 2,2,K,K,5 - do you hold the two pair or go for
the
possible set of 2's with a kicker?
2) You are dealt K,A,J,Q,4 (only the KQ is suited)...do you go for
a
flush or two card royal or do you hold for the straight?
Any advice from any tournament pros?
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
missdeuces wrote:
Thanks for the reply. It seems that you are the only one that
offered any help.
I'll belatedly speak up and chime in with Doug -- pushing quads and
royals is the way to go. In a short tournament with a high variance
game such as DDB, these are the hands that are going to distinguish
the finishers. One set of quad Aces will wash away any advantage in
getting a few extra FH or F/S.
If you want to work up a strategy, I'd take a tool such as Frugal VP
or VP Strategy Master and simply zero out any hand below a quad.
You're going to come away with a very simple strategy that will be a
breeze to play, improving your odds all the more.
- Harry
Thank You Harry. This is very good advice.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "Harry Porter" <harry.porter@...>
wrote:
missdeuces wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. It seems that you are the only one that
> offered any help.I'll belatedly speak up and chime in with Doug -- pushing quads and
royals is the way to go. In a short tournament with a high
variance
game such as DDB, these are the hands that are going to distinguish
the finishers. One set of quad Aces will wash away any advantage
in
getting a few extra FH or F/S.
If you want to work up a strategy, I'd take a tool such as Frugal
VP
or VP Strategy Master and simply zero out any hand below a quad.
You're going to come away with a very simple strategy that will be
a
breeze to play, improving your odds all the more.
- Harry
So, playing tournament DDB, what's the right hold with AAA37?
Yes, this is a trick question, of sorts.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "Harry Porter" <harry.porter@...> wrote:
missdeuces wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. It seems that you are the only one that
> offered any help.I'll belatedly speak up and chime in with Doug -- pushing quads and
royals is the way to go. In a short tournament with a high variance
game such as DDB, these are the hands that are going to distinguish
the finishers. One set of quad Aces will wash away any advantage in
getting a few extra FH or F/S.
_________________________________________________________________________
I wrote:
> In a short tournament with a high variance
> game such as DDB, these are the hands [Q/RF] that are going to
> distinguish the finishers. One set of quad Aces will wash away any
> advantage in getting a few extra FH or F/S.
paladingamingllc wrote:
So, playing tournament DDB, what's the right hold with AAA37?
Yes, this is a trick question, of sorts.
I deliberately kept my answer brief, reflecting two things:
- I haven't taken the time to analyze this particular tournament in
detail previously;
- I could easily get carried away with strategy speculation 
and,
for something that's going to occupy 10 minutes of your life, keeping
things simple in preparation isn't a bad way to go.
------
One thing I didn't address is that when you analyze adjustments to the
tournament paytable (incl Q/RF only, e.g.) to develop strategy it's
prudent to consider weighting hands differently than from their actual
payouts.
The top winner in a tournament is the player on whom the variance god
shines most strongly when it comes to high paying hits. That suggests
that you slant strategy in favor of higher paying hits when you aren't
giving up too much in EV.
In the hand you put forward, the respect hold EV's for AAA and AAA3
are 46.2 and 42.5 (based on our quad/RF only paytable). You give up
about 8% EV if you go for the AAA3 with what is likely a desirable
shot to really advance yourself in the field. That's a reasonable
sacrifice and I'd go for the AAA3.
------
Ok, that said, we're faced with a problem. If we stick with standard
payouts on the quads and RF, we're stuck making manual adjustments to
a strategy chart we might print out of Frugal VP or VP Strategy
Master. Plus, we can't practice our alternate tournament strategy
using software since it's going to flag AAA3 in this case as an error.
The only resolution is to tweak the paytable a bit to give it the
variance skew that we desire.
Now, again, I'd prefer to keep things simple here. The decision above
was made based upon a modest EV sacrifice in going for the big payout.
So, making a seat of my pants call, lets boost the payout of kicker
quads and the RF in our adjusted paytable by 20% (or 10% or 15%; you
make the call). If you do that, AAA3 now comes out one top.
-----
A note about my suggested tournament strategy paytable. I'd have a
strong inclination to include high pair and trip pays.
These don't bias away from quads (although they do shift play away
from bonus quads somewhat). The return tied up in these two pays is
strong enough to warrant strategy consideration.
However, it's again a situation where I might reduce their values by
20%, so that variance is still given emphasis. In truth, the
inclusion of these pays is merely an inclination. There's a lot to be
said for keeping things simple.
-----
Obviously, there's no strict science to these calls. Someone who
really wants to shoot for the top prize and could care less about
coming in 10th, given the disparity of prizes, might bump up the Aces
w/ kicker by 40%. And someone who, as an alternate to fine tuning
strategy, would be panning for change in the streets (or simply is
"Sleepless in Philly" ;), might spend hours working on a strategy that
would truly maximize expected cash payout on the tournament.
So, Paladin, does the seal get it's fish today? ...
- H.