Scalps Strategy

Hitchhiker's Guide to...

Playing in the 60+5+5(scalp) last night in the Jackpot. 6,500 starting chips.

There was some craziness surrounding the 5 euro scalp chip from most of the players. E.g. blinds 75-150, short-stack moves all-in with K-Qs for his remaining 1,300. Big blind calls with K-3off for 25 percent of his stack purely (in his words) to 'take the scalp chip'.

Now, it doesn't seem like a good play to donk off 25 percent of your chips in a tournament with 1,000 euro to play for, in order to win 5 euro. But it seems to be a general problem of people overvaluing the so-called 'free money' of a scalp chip.

How much is the scalp chip worth?

Is the scalp chip worth the value of the scalp chip divided by the cost of the starting stack (5/65 or 1/13 in this tournament), or is it worth a percentage of scalp chip divided by your current stack, or should the fact that there is a scalp chip in play not enter into your considerations in your playing?

Mr.Plough

im not worried about the scalp. its just a nice bonus for when i put someone out.

if people want to rish 25% of their stacks for a fiver, they can do it with a $1 buy in.

5starpool

Ignore the scalp chip. This doesn't improve your odds in any way, so you are either getting the right price or you are not. The fact that people are making crazy calls just to get a scapl is a good thing from your point of view.

LuckyLloyd

This post has been deleted.

brianmc

UnLuckyLloyd wrote:

Play the tournament as you normally would, and the rest will look after itself. The vast majority of the prize money will be paid out in the general prizepool so it makes no sense whatsoever to make negative EV plays from a persepective of winning the tournament - in the hope of nicking a scalp chip. If you win the tournament and only end up with one scalp will you give a sh!t? I think not.

It would still be an interesting calculation to see the effect of the scalp chip on $EV as opposed to chip EV in the hand. Although I think the value of the scalp would need to be quite a percentage of the value of the buy-in before any negative chip EV situations become positive $EV ones. And even then it would only have a significant impact in the early stages of the tournament before too many players get knocked out.

If you were into that kind of thing.

bell_boy

The couple of times I've been influenced by the scap is when I'm short stack and the all in is an even shorter stack. I have almost no EV in the tourny, but a reasonable portion of the scalp. Besides, there are cash games waiting which are +EV ... (hmm, maybe that is why I'm not a very good tourney player ).

PiperT

Roundtower2 wrote:

How much is the scalp chip worth?

This scalp nonsense goes on all the time. Fitz on a Friday night is hilarious where you get people on major hollywood style dwell ups with pure rags just because they think the €10 scalp is worth winning.

Scalps adds a bit of fun/banter to a game and I guess thats important too but I cannot understand how people put so much value on these chips for such a large proportion of their stack, especially when they are massive dogs in the hand.

"The Chief" might have a different view though....:D

DITTag

What seat where you in on the 1st table?

I was seat 5!