  The generalized Poor-Verdu error lower bound established in [1] for
multihypothesis testing is studied in the classical channel coding context. It
is proved that for any sequence of block codes sent over the memoryless binary
symmetric channel (BSC), the minimum probability of error (under maximum
likelihood decoding) has a relative deviation from the generalized bound that
grows at most linearly in blocklength. This result directly implies that for
arbitrary codes used over the BSC, decoder ties can only affect the
subexponential behavior of the minimum probability of error.
