Poker Stars $6.00+$0.50 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t300/t600 Blinds - 9 players
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

Hero (SB): t3955
BB: t1490
UTG: t14650
UTG+1: t15535
UTG+2: t5430
MP1: t2655
MP2: t13470
CO: t8535
BTN: t1780

Pre Flop: Hero is SB with 7 7
5 folds, CO raises to t4200, 1 fold, Hero...

This is closer than I first thought. The BB is going to be priced in to call with any two cards, and while some players will fold anyway, most players will realize that calling here with ATC will be better than going another orbit with 1 BB desparately hoping that 2 people will bust. That means the CO can't push ATC like he might if BB had 3k or 4k.

If we give CO { 77+, A7s+, K9s+, QTs+, JTs, ATo+, KTo+, QJo } (15% of hands in PokerStove) and BB ATC, we'll have about 35% equity in the 4770 chip main pot and 45% equity in the 4930 side pot. So our cEV of calling is only 3,888 and the $EV will be even more negative.

[censored], why must we play like nits when it comes to ICM!?

I just play tournaments with huge fields, and play bad, so that way I never have to worry about final table ICM stuff since I don't know enough about it. Although my strategy is working in that regard I think it may need some tweaks.....

ICM = infinite guessing!!
i could easily post 20 hands every day in here regarding push/fold decisions i made and wasnt quite sure whether it was correct or not regardless of the result of each hand..
it kills me to open shuv k8s in the cutoff with 3bb because the bb almost alwayscalls with any facecard, but i also dont want to pass up what might be a profitable situation given the players behind know where th fold btn is..

the one thing that confuses me the most about icm or chipev is that when your calculating whether its profitable or not its all based on your opponents calling ranges. which we assign general guidelines.. and i think thats the tricky part... GENERALIZING calling ranges for all players but theres so many factors and so many players have so many different perspectives of the game

There are a few things I've noticed about hand ranges and cEV pushbotting:

I. One can add or subtract a few hands without substantially changing the equity of the hand when the villain does call or push. Here's the 77 hand against some heads up ranges:

Even though we've doubled villain's range, our equity with 77 has only increased 6.3%. In these situations, debating whether or not a villain is going to call or push with KQ isn't as interesting as whether he'd call with any two cards or a mere 10% of hands.

Of course, if we're pushing, one villain calling twice as often as another means we steal the blinds less frequently with the looser opponent. And if we're pushing with junk, the fold equity makes for most of the positive EV of a push.

II. Pretty much any junk offsuit hand has about 30% equity against all but the tightest ranges.

III. After the top 35% of hands or so, the only hands left are junk suited and unsuited hands. An opponent pushing or calling with T7s might as well be doing it with 32o.

Overall, when choosing cEV pushes at the table, I try to guess my opponent's calling or pushing range as "tight" (10%-15%), "loose" (25%-30%) or "any two" and not to get any more specific than that.

ICM is what gets me. For an MTT'r like myself, the natural tendency when stacks get low and tables get shorthanded is to get hyperagressive and push nonstop. However, the consequence of diminishing returns of chips means that we must play tighter and choose spots with more cEV.

I have noticed, however, that when there are one or two stacks with 1-2BB at the FT of a 45, one has to get really tight until they bust. I'd come up with an example, but it's late and I'm tired.

How I pine for my naive days where I'd push about 75% of the time 4-handed.

There are programs that can do ICM simulations. SNGWiz is probably the most actively developed program and SNGPT is the granddaddy of this niche, but I've already used up my SNGWiz trial and I don't want to buy it until I have the bankroll for the $12 turbo 45s and 180s. But enough about me.

I'm sure someone's going to mention Kill Everyone or that 2+2 SnG book whose name escapes me, and I should probably read them instead of trying to write long, rambling essays about subjects I admittedly know barely anything about.

heres one kinda soporific.. i really thought this was a close one but since my hand wasnt really that great and quite marginal i figured why gamble when i can only win by holding up by showdown... my plan was to shuv on the short stack to my left the next hand and give him the decision and if successful id be right back where i was at the start of this hand..

btw hey i appreciate the input about equities and hand ranges. imo there should be an entire forum strictly for icm push fold type hands.. as faar as sitngo wiz we are on the same page... sent alotta time with that in the micro stts on ftp and after the expiry i came to stars $6 stts and donked off like 400 buyins while playing way to many tables due to the boredom of stts.. thats when i decided mtsngs could be more profittable for me but as like you said just waiting til i get a bankroll for the 12/180s... so far 0/2 for attempts with 50 buyins at $12/180s and $12/45s.. all the way back down to $20 and to the $1/45s LOL

fwiw it seems like you may know more than me on the technical side of icm..

This 66 hand is a call. (Oh no! Another long, rambling essay ahead!)

First, if we go to an ICM Calculator. To use one of these, put the chip counts of all the players in the columns, and the payouts across the top, then click "calculate". The equities spit out on the right side.

We can calculate our equity for each possible situation: folding, pushing and losing, and pushing and winning.

If we fold, we'll be left with 6,565 chips and our equity is 6.54 buy-ins.
If we push and win, we'll be up to 16,505 chips and our equity will be 8.996 buy-ins.
If we push and lose, we'll be out and we'll win 4 buy-ins for 5th place.

With a bit of algebra, we can figure out how often we need to win in order to break-even. We want to push only when the equity of pushing is better than the equity of folding, or...

Equity of pushing > Equity of folding

We already know the equity of folding, but there are two scenarios when we call. We can combine the two by multiplying how often we win by the equity of winning and multiplying how often we lose by the equity of losing. In other words

Equity of pushing = Equity of winning * Probability of winning + Equity of losing * Probability of losing

Let's call the probability of winning x. If we win with probability x, the we'll lose with probability (1-x). We can also change the equities of winning and losing to W and L respectively so it's easier to type, so...

Equity of pushing = W * x + L * (1-x) = (W-L) * x + L

If we bring that back to the original equation and call the equity of folding F, we get:

(W-L) * x + L > F

And with some algebraic hand waving, we can find out how often we need to win to correctly call:

x > (F - L)/(W - L)

We can plug that formula into the problem at hand:

x > (6.54 - 4) / (8.996 - 4)
x > .508

So we only need to win about 51% of the time to call. We don't have a read on the villain, but we expect him to be very loose, given the circumstances. If we give him a range of any pair, any ace, and any two broadway (about 27.6% of hands), PokerStove gives us an equity of 53.6%. Since we're winning more often than we need to, we should call.

Also, some notes on your reason for folding.

1. Don't forget that poker is gambling. If it is folded to us the next hand, even though we won't be eliminated if we push the short stack all in, we're still risking our money to win money.

2. Someone might push in front of us on the next hand, and steal our chance to give the short stack a decision for all of his chips.

3. If we call and win this hand and it's folded to us next hand, we can take both this edge and the next edge and not give up anything.

wow very indepth explaination of calculating icm... i appreciate it!! i think thats the exact reason why it may be worth the $100 for sngwiz to do all that in seconds after the session when i want to check hands.... i guess theres really know way to know for sure at the time of the decision whether your situational leans 2% one way or the other deaming it an incorrect or correct call/push/fold mathematically...