Hi. I have a very short question about chapter 9 - Detailed Analysis of a professional SNG - of Kill Everyone.

Throughout this chapter there is constant generic quilibrium advice, for instance p. 212: 'The equilibrium play is for Ivey to push with 29% and for the others to call him 9%, 13% and 15% of the time' - my question is how do the authors know this? I can't find anywhere else in the book where the optimal pushing frequencies are given for a tournament of this format.

Another example, again p. 212: 'Another straightforward hand. QJo is strong enough to steal from the button and no one else has much of anything.' How is this such an easy decision. QJo is good but not great, and I haven't come across any other material in the book which would make this an insta-push.

The whole chapter is loaded with equilibrium plays for the situations, but I wonder how am I supposed to figure them out?

Any replies appreciated.

Playing around with an ICM calculator would probably help you better understand these charts.

I thought kill everyone was a great book but the way the push charts are presented was not intuitive for me. I would suggest Moshman's Sng book if you are on a budget.

If you are willing to invest the money Zerosum has an SNG excellent package that has a really great way of explaining ICM. He has a chart system like "Kill Everyone" but also explains ICM in away that I wish was available when I started playing SNG's back in 2005.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33...n-gos-1179190/

I wrote a 3 part review of the book and I strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to understand how to be a winning SNG player but is struggling with push/fold situations.

There are no charts of these situations because each one is a unique solution with deferent stack sizes. Plus the payout was nonstandard for a SNG. So we couldn't include every example when we wrote it. As mentioned above, an ICM calculator will get you close to the right answer.

On the QJo hand, that should be an insta-push as the chip leader from the button. In any of the examples given throughout the text, QJo is far from a threshold hand in this situation. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.

Tysen

Thanks for your reply. I've looked at the QJo hand on p. 212, and have played around with ICM a bit and worked out:

Juanda's bubble factor vs Ulliot = 1.57
Ulliot's BF vs Juanda = 2.43


I assume that as chip leader, Juanda should be taking avantage of the fact that he has his opponents covered, and knows that, due to their high bubble pressures, he can push more often, knowing that their risk of busting out forces them to call with premium hands only, and thus less often. So I understand why the chip leader should be playing bully in this situation and pushing hands like QJo. Conversely, the risk of busting out before the bubble bursts dictates that everyone folds more often to an all-in by the chip-leader.

However, I still can't figure out where you derive the equilibrium pushing percentages from. You say that you didn't put these in the book because they're all unique and stack-size-dependent - please could you go through this one example so that I can understand the generic methodology (which I could then reapply myself for specific examples)?

Btw: currently reading your contribution to TRE. Interesting stuff.