From JP in the forum who plays on Full Tilt. I read this today by Nenad Medic, (FT pro), and found it interesting. His first thought is make the money then go for the win. Concentrate on getting past the bubble. Then he went on to the final table aspect and that is where this hit me:

A hand from Event #1 of this year's WSOP illustrates my point. We had reached four-handed play where the difference in finishing first and fourth was more than $500,000 when I got involved in a pot with Andy Bloch. I was holding pocket 7s and led out at a flop of Q-Q-3 only to have Andy make a pot-sized raise behind me. Though I don't know what Andy was holding, I'm guessing that he may have had over-cards and, possibly, a flush draw. While my two pair of 7s and Queens may have very well been good, it would cost me my entire stack on what was essentially a coin flip in order to find out. In the end, I laid my hand down and looked for a better spot.

All too often my read is dead on, I know exactyl what they have sometimes and once called it out down to the suit and cards held! Yet I am constantly losing to being outdrawn, luckouts, suckouts, etc... Granted, both of us in with AK and losing to flush, ok, bad luck. KK losing to JJ flopping a set, yeah, bad luck. But the suckouts with them playing J4s or o and ending up with a drawn flush, sheesh, very bad beat. But then it dawned on me in the next paragraph!

First, I had a big enough stack at this point that I wasn't committed to continuing with the hand and, while folding to Andy cost me some chips, I could still fold and sit comfortably in second chip position at the table. Secondly, and even more importantly, even if I was ahead of Andy on the flop, my read gave him 13 outs (approximately, a 40% chance) to make his hand. With my tournament life on the line if I called, I just wasn't getting the odds to gamble.

I AM looking at the read and what he has but too often I am not looking at HIS outs. Only mine and if I'm ahead or not. The ONLY time I look to their outs is in the flop with an obvious flush or str8 draw. I know they have a lot of outs and if my hand is great like AA or AK and flop is AKx, then I am betting that flop hard with an overbet to make sure they have not odds to call for the fool running with 84s or 35s for example. But if it's the turn and say a str8 isn't obvious I'm still running my 2 pair or TPTK without considering the percent of chance THEY can hit. I am still looking at my percent to improve. If I put them on flush draw still, I do figure their odds and compare them to mine and the pot odds to stay involved. But I am not doing it on all their hands.

I think that MAYBE, if I start counting their outs I might be able to make some better laydowns. I layed down QQ, set 2's and TPTK post flop yesterday. The end result was I lasted longer though it didn't do much else for me. Still, it was the point that I found something missing in my hand analysis/decision making process and that was including their outs ALL the time in any equation, not just some of the time. Long term this may yield decent results. If I can avoid a GCI and losing to yet another suckout. My friend/mentor has been telling me he don't understand it but I have GOT to be doing something wrong to lose so much and losing with good hands usually. Well, this MIGHT be what I have been doing wrong. Only time will tell.

Marty`s side note: GCI is a definition of a tournament hand that essentially represents a big decision in for a big chunk of chips in your stack. It is short for Game Critical Intersect where if you are green or yellow mzoned and the result of the hand you are participating will bring you to Orange, red, Grey or eliminated if you lose.