During the session, it's time consume to calculate ICM, what I do now is calculating the bubble factor, use this factor to adjust the pot odd and accord the pot odd to decides "call or fold, push or fold". Due to lack of considering many other circumstances, that must be many error and far away from the true ICM value, so does anyone know a easier and proper way to work ICM out? Hope you guys can share.

Well an easier way to figure this out is assign a value to your stack, min-cashing, or simply folding to get a pay jump. In certain positions it’s good to let the small stacks knock each other out and just autopilot through the pay out structure. On overly passive tables you should be extremely aggressive to steal blinds or dead money, taking into consideration your opponents are weak or simply just playing ABC poker.

The problem I have with using an estimate of icm is that our opponents are not necessarily playing good strategies. When they call too much the value of stealing goes way down. The introduction of a loose player to an otherwise strong field of players will have the effect of bringing down the value of stealing with the weaker hands in solid preflop ranges. Even in a heads up pot vs the loose player, there is a loss of tourney ev for the preflop raiser that is distributed to the other remaining players.

The obvious example here:

3 handed in the money, 4 spots paid.
Blinds have 30bb each, I have 40bb.

I raise 3x on the button, loose player in the small blind calls, action is on the big blind.



The big blind should know that his ev with suited hands just went up, which allows a wider preflop calling range as well as a wider 3 betting range.

This is illustrative of the reason it’s good to have overly tight players to our left.

I know not everyone can play accord to Nash equilibrium, so ICM may sometime misslead to over push or call too less. I agreed that we should adjust our call and push range accord to the table.

Yes, adjusting is what we want to do. We don’t not wanting to be shoving a decent stack, as recreational or loose players have a wide range. We don’t want to be a victim of luck and taking a hit to our stack. However, if we are in position we want to take advantage of players we have an edge on and rake in the money if our stack is considerably larger than our opponents.