In a tournament, sometimes it is correct to make plays that you would never consider in a ring game. The converse is also true, sometimes in tournaments at Sportsbook.com you will not make plays that you normally would in regular play.
An example of this is when you are dealt pocket aces at the final table of a tournament. Let’s assume you are the smallest stack with $100,000 in chips. The remaining five players each have roughly $1 million in front of them. If you are last to act and three others before you go all-in it is sometimes correct to fold. This is true when the expected value of folding and thus eliminating from the tournament two of the three people going all-in is greater than the value of winning in a four-way pot.
If the prize structure is $100,000 for 6th, $200,000 for 5th, $500,000 for 4th, $750,000 for 3rd, $1 million for 2nd, and $2 million for 1st, you can gain a clearer picture of why throwing away such a good hand makes sense. You are currently in 6th place, and thus guaranteed at least $100,000. If two people are eliminated as they would be in the above example, you are then guaranteed 4th place for a minimum profit of $400,000.
In order to know if this is the correct play or not, you need to formulate a rough approximation of how much you would win on average by calling the three all-ins ahead of you. In a four-way pot, two aces will win roughly 64 percent of the time according to our poker software reviews. This means that for every $1 wagered, you would see a gain of $0.64. Furthermore, when you risk the entire $100,000, you are increasing your chip stack to $400,000 only 64 percent of the time; in other words, on the average you are only gaining $64,000 each time you play this hand—given an infinite number of trials. This is not even near the extra $400,000 that you are guaranteed by folding.