I play alot of sit&g0 9 players. And in general i play as the Icm told us to play. But sometimes i have some doubt. Icm make us play in a deffencive way. But personaly i believe that the best deffence is the offencive.

Exemple if we have 99 and the chip leader push around 33% and The Icm programs say to fold on the bubble. Do the Icm programs calcul that if we call and win we will have alot better chance to finish first? And if we fold the others players may accumulate chips and make us finishing 4th or 3th.

The Icm seams to have the 3th place as the primary goal. But if we call whit the 99 for exemple we risk to finish 4th. But in fact we have better chance to win whit a range better than our opponment. And it will bring us in the money and in better posture to finish second or first for even more money.

So, my question is... Do the ICM programs calcul all those things or they only calcul the probability to be ((IN THE MONEY)) ???

(Sorry for my English hope u understand im french canadian)

There are certain factors that ICM does not account for, but your examples are not these.

The whole point of ICM is to account for the probability of finishing in each place. Accordingly, it will account for the increased value of your equity after doubling up if you call with 99 on the bubble. Your equity in the tournament on the bubble does not double when you double up, but it does go to 0 when you lose. Because of this, you need a greater than 50% chance to win to make a call profitable.

The question about how well ICM works rests more with how well ICM evaluates these probabilities of winning. ICM fails to account for differences in player skill, as well as the differences in how a chip stack can be played (i.e. being over a certain threshold in chips allows you to steal). In a similar way, the stack sizes and play styles at your table can affect the true equity of your chips. These factors are too complicated to build into a model, but ICM is a very good starting point from which you can base your decisions.

Also significant is the assumption made by ICM that a player's chances of winning first are directly proportional to the ratio of their stack size to the total amount of chips in play, which may be false even if all players are equally skilled.

Icm doesn't concentrate on getting itm, it is just a simple model to evaluate how much your stack is worth in real money terms with a certain stack distribution.
It does not take into all possible factors but you can do that yourself - evaluate the situation with an icm tool then decide how the situation is affected by these other factors. In SnGWiz you can assign an edge (always work out your own and don't rely on a default).
Icm takes into account the payout structure you always have to input this to get a result. If you had a 9 seat 50%,30%,20% situation it gives you input to make your decision to account for this structure. If instead the structure was 100%, ie, winner-takes-all, you get the same result as chip ev from icm and any any structure in between is smoothly modeled. This takes a lot of the guesswork out but you still always have to use common sense and adjust for other known factors. Icm is an easy way of measuring one part of the puzzle.

Thanks everyone! I am rasurated

if top 2 get paid 10k, 3 players left. button shoves 5000 chips, sb with 8 chips folds, you in the bb with 4988 chips and AA, do you call? of course you would not

you just applied icm. super obvious icm in this case, usually it's not that easy. research icm and ur expected value, it is the backbone of tourney play, even moreso in sngs. games where there is/are bubble factors and pay jumps, icm is everything.

You don't seem to know what ICM is. I'm sorry I do not have an immediate link to give you. But I would suggest learning more about ICM.

only in god

I echo rkv's comment that ICM may have some weaknesses, but not the one you mention. Overall, ICM is pretty good.

The reason you think ICM concentrates on third place is that ICM correctly weights all places according to their payouts, while you (and most players) miss the fact that the first place winner wastes a lot of chips.

Lets say there is a total of 10,000 in chips, and on the last hand one player has 8,000 and another player has 2,000. They go all in, and the 8,000 player wins. He wasted 3,000 chips in the sense that he still would have won the tournament if he had had 5,000 chips instead of 8,000.

Of course, until the tournament is over, you don't know which chips are wasted in the sense above. But the more chips you hold, the better your chance of finishing first, and the more chips are likely to be wasted.

If you think of chips as equally valuable regardless of stack size, as most players tend to do, then you will overvalue big stacks and finishing first. ICM will appear to overvalue small stacks and finishing third.