12/23/2010 Entering a tournament late

A few days ago someone asked about this on the twoplustwo.com poker forums.  In my post, M is the number of times that the dealer button can go around the table such that the player would still have chips left if he did not play a hand.  Q is a relationship to the average chip stack in the tournament--a Q of 1.0 is an average chip stack.

The question is in red, my response is in blue.

inspired by the thread above, i wanted to question if it is good to wait for the last possible moment to late register in a tournament, as you will have lesser players to survive. The downside is of course, that most maniacs and fishes have already given their chips away.

in an extreme case scenario for instance if it were possible to register anytime you would want to buyin after the bubble.
 
Re: buying in late in tournaments
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In the MTTs that I play on PokerStars (10-15 minute blinds), I've noticed that as a rough measurement, I have to double my stack every hour in order to keep up with the average chip stack, at least for the first couple hours. To put in another way, if the tournament starts with 1,500-chip stacks, by the first break I should have ~3,000 chips to have a Q of 1.
 
So, if I would have to have 3,000 chips to start level 2, I would need 6K to start level 3, and 12K to start level 4. Given that reality, I almost never start more than 1 blind level late. I'm just too far behind in the chip accumlation race, and it doesn't make sense for me to be playing catch-up 4 or 5 levels into the tournament.
 
The other issue is how limiting it can be to start a tournament with a relatively small M. Being in that position seriously lowers your fold equity, and more specifically, the possiblity of facing a big move (even all-in) from you won't be very scary from the perpsective of someone who has acculated 3X your stack while you were waiting to join the tournament.

If you join a tournament an hour late, you're bringing to knife to a gunfight.