what is the minimum number of hands you can lose and finish second?
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Joined: Feb '08
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 35 (M)
Posts: 1886
Today's poll is a teaser for you:
If you came second in a 100 man tourney, what is the minimum number of hands you could have lost?
By lost I mean any hand where you have less chips after the hand is over. Any hand where you don't commit chips to the pot and fold preflop would not count but any hand where you pay blinds would.
On a side note is there a maxium number of hands you can lose and finish second?
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Australia
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Posted by marqis:
He... I beat Jess to it...
damn you. I'll reply soon. I need to think about it.
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Posted by marqis: Ok, I'll go for the obvious answer: 1; the last hand of the tournament. But given the tone of the question I must be overlooking something.
Joined: Nov '11
Location: Poland
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Minimum: 1 (lose to winner) Maximum: 25+ of course...
Easy answer: In example - you win hand and lose hand, next player win hand and lose hand, etc. etc... In extremely rare cases, after 10 wins and 10 loses, each player may have the starting chips stack...
Joined: May '08
Location: Lithuania
Age: 39 (M)
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well if the format is "time tournament" (there are those in pokerstars) you actually can lose 0 hands and still come in second- or any below. so 0 is my answer. side question- a lot (from those answers given 25+), but actually this depends from starting chips (like b1gfoot mentioned above) if it's a chip and chair tourney you can lose max 1 hand only...really wicked question
Joined: Feb '08
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 35 (M)
Posts: 1886
Posted by marqis: Ok, I'll go for the obvious answer: 1; the last hand of the tournament. But given the tone of the question I must be overlooking something.
There should not be a maximum, as long as the blinds stop increasing at some point before the final two are both all in...
This would be the obvious answer but in order to lose out to one player you would have to go all-in with less chips when it came to HU. Having won every hand until this point I would suggest that makes you a big stack compared to the other player and you would have to lose several hands in order to lose that final place.
Ok so it's possible to win your blinds back each round and stay relatively short stacked but what about when antes start. You would be technically invloved in every hand and therefore in order to not lose you would have to knock every player out. Correct me if i'm wrong. So for any tourney with antes the answer would be 3-10.
I agree that there would be no maximum but regardless of whether the blinds increase or not. Even if both players are all-in by ante they could still theoretically alternate chip lead forever.
Joined: Jan '11
Location: United States
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Well this is a spoiler once one reads the replies, but I'll be honest. i was going to pick 25+ just because I figure if I hung around until the end I probably played several hands winning only a few large pots and folding out of several after seeing the flop. At least that's generally how I play since I don't chase to often and I do fold generally after missing on the flop unless I decide to steal a hand or two.
Posted by marqis: Ok, I'll go for the obvious answer: 1; the last hand of the tournament. But given the tone of the question I must be overlooking something.
There should not be a maximum, as long as the blinds stop increasing at some point before the final two are both all in...
This would be the obvious answer but in order to lose out to one player you would have to go all-in with less chips when it came to HU. Having won every hand until this point I would suggest that makes you a big stack compared to the other player and you would have to lose several hands in order to lose that final place.
Ok so it's possible to win your blinds back each round and stay relatively short stacked but what about when antes start. You would be technically invloved in every hand and therefore in order to not lose you would have to knock every player out. Correct me if i'm wrong. So for any tourney with antes the answer would be 3-10.
I'll have to correct you, I'm afraid...
Even when antes start at level 1, and you're involved in every hand, your stack can stay relatively small. If everybody at your table folds every hand, you only get the blinds and antes, while the eventual winner is knocking out players left and right, increasing his stack much faster.
At the final table your stack can be tiny compared to your opponent's stack, even though you played and won every hand up until then... When on the first hand at the final table everyone goes all in, you'll end up in second place, if you loose that hand to the biggest stack, and you are the second biggest stack.
Pochui has a point with "time tournaments", albeit a little bit contrived. I have never heard of this format...
Joined: May '08
Location: Lithuania
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Posted by marqis: Pochui has a point with "time tournaments", albeit a little bit contrived. I have never heard of this format...
in pokerstars client: take off tournament filters if you have any, and in the search field enter TIME, you will see those tourneys immediately, they have a small clock icon next to them.
Posted by marqis: Pochui has a point with "time tournaments", albeit a little bit contrived. I have never heard of this format...
in pokerstars client: take off tournament filters if you have any, and in the search field enter TIME, you will see those tourneys immediately, they have a small clock icon next to them.
I believe you (I did not mean to question it, it's just that I did not know that it existed...).
I take back the "contrived" qualification. You were just thinking outside the box, and came up with the best answer.
Joined: Feb '08
Location: United Kingdom
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Posts: 1886
Posted by marqis: I'll have to correct you, I'm afraid...
Even when antes start at level 1, and you're involved in every hand, your stack can stay relatively small. If everybody at your table folds every hand, you only get the blinds and antes, while the eventual winner is knocking out players left and right, increasing his stack much faster.
At the final table your stack can be tiny compared to your opponent's stack, even though you played and won every hand up until then... When on the first hand at the final table everyone goes all in, you'll end up in second place, if you loose that hand to the biggest stack, and you are the second biggest stack.
Pochui has a point with "time tournaments", albeit a little bit contrived. I have never heard of this format...
Although it's 'possible' that everyone on your table will fold every hand, it's not really going to happen if players on other tables are playing normally. If we are talking about probability then there is a very small chance of extreme hand scenarios such as one player winning every hand or everyone getting amazing cards and going all-in, so no matter how unlikely it's theoretically possible but the situation you describe relies on odd actions from players.
At least Pochui's answer is credible. In fact I see no reason why you couldn't win every hand and finish second in a time tournament and I did not specify the type of tournament in my question. I still think that in a regular tournament the answer must be higher although I did not write the question so that I definitely knew the answer.
Posted by awood88: Although it's 'possible' that everyone on your table will fold every hand, it's not really going to happen if players on other tables are playing normally. If we are talking about probability then there is a very small chance of extreme hand scenarios such as one player winning every hand or everyone getting amazing cards and going all-in, so no matter how unlikely it's theoretically possible but the situation you describe relies on odd actions from players.
At least Pochui's answer is credible. In fact I see no reason why you couldn't win every hand and finish second in a time tournament and I did not specify the type of tournament in my question. I still think that in a regular tournament the answer must be higher although I did not write the question so that I definitely knew the answer.
If you ask for a "minimum", it becomes a mathematical question. This means that if 1 is possible (how ever unlikely it may be), any answer higher than that is wrong. It's not a question of credibility.
As it turns out (as demonstrated by Pochui) 0 is possible, so any other answer is simply wrong.
The likeliness of my scenario is not great, but it's just taken to the extreme, for argument's sake. There are plenty of less extreme paths to ending up with the second largest stack at the final table, without losing a single hand.
I play a freeroll tournament on Party where I frequently end up on a table with all players except me sitting out. This means a boring half hour of clicking the call button, while I run down all of their stacks, one blind at a time. I've even created an AutoHotkey script just for this purpose...
When I've finally eliminated them, I often find that when new players replace the knocked out ones, a lot of them have much bigger stacks than me. In the time it took me to take out 9 players one blind at a time, they took out many more players, that went all in against them...
