Stress triaxiality is recognized as one of the most important factors for predicting the failure strain of ductile metals. This study dealt with the effect of the average stress triaxiality on the failure strain of a typical low-temperature high-strength marine structural steel, EH36. Tensile tests were carried out on flat specimens with different notches, from relatively smooth to very sharp levels. Numerical simulations of each specimen were performed by using ABAQUS. The failure initiation points in numerical simulations were identified from a comparison of the engineering stress vs. strain curves obtained from experiments with simulated ones. The failure strain curves for various dimensionless critical energy levels were established in the average stress triaxiality domain and compared with the identified failure strain points. It was observed that most of the failure initiation points were approximated with a 100% dimensionless critical energy curve. It was concluded that the failure strains were well expressed as a function of the average stress triaxiality.