6/135 remaining, weekly tournament in major US city, 12k starting stack.

I have about 240k in CO. BN has ~340k, SB ~100k, BB ~400k. I cover, HJ and LJ (100k and 200k stacks ish) so I'm in 3rd.

The blind level is 6k small blind, 12k big blind + 12k big blind ante

Folds to me in the CO with AQo and I ship it all-in.

BN calls with JJ and I lose.

Payouts were:
4200
2600
1600
1000
750
600
...
(15 places paid)

So I finished 6th. The BB ante was kind of messing with me I guess, made me feel like I had 10bb but I guess I really had 20 and therefore raise/fold here is the play? Also with two 100k stacks and another short-ish stack, seems going AI in here could easily have been a punt.

EDIT: Probably also worth noting the chip leader seemed quite good and I discussed tournament theory on the side with him during break, so he was decent. 2nd CL didn't seem as good looked sorta OMC (guy who called off JJ). Of the remaining 3, all seemed pretty average at best. (Just my potentially **** reads though lol)

EDIT2: I guess even if I had "10bb" (which I don't think that's how to think about this spot...), it'd still be a punt then too given there's two 4bb stacks...

Thoughts?

It'll be close between raise decide and shove, you have all the info here to plug it into an ICM calculator to see what theory says.

Without doing the ICM calculations, I don't really hate it because you have a ton of fold equity and there's a good chance that with the stack distribution you can't call a shove from a covering stack, but you can get them to fold some hands that would shove on you, like medium pairs.

I think from a pure ICM perspective it's probably pretty close between raise-call off and jam, although the existence of two short stacks adds some complexity.

If our read is that one of the covering stacks is an OMC, then I actually don't hate raise-fold against his shoving range because it will probably be super tight especially if he's not the covering stack.

Can't run HRC right now but when I get a chance I'll see what it says.

Yeah, I was definitely making some assumptions that the other stacks are aware of ICM and the big stacks understand how they can use it to put pressure on you. AQo might be a raise/call if, say, the BB is just going to shove any suited ace when folded to. But that seems like it might be an excessively optimistic assumption, where I was thinking of similar-strength hands that are viable three-bets like 77-99, that you don't want to be flipping against and can make fold with a shove.

I'm going ALL IN!

So plugging into ICMIZER, to the best of my ability...

Caveats:
- I just put ante as 2k which seems similar enough to BB 12k ante? Same amount of chips in middle but probably does change the situation somewhat if BB pays it vs if all players are splitting it equally.

So yea naively inputting the situation and not editing any of the ranges, AQo is a pretty clear push:




If I min-raise, and BB shoves, it is a pretty clear call:



But that assume he's pushing 33% of hands! He was a good player, but I'm not sure he's really pushing 54s 85s+ etc... If I reduce his range to 21%, then AQo becomes a fold!



Pretty interesting, so in that sense shoving is kind of nice given how tight I have to call when shoved on if I assign what I think is a more realistic range to BB.


Of course actual result I faced sucks, but who knows, if I won that flip I might not even have posted this thread and got all the nice feedback . Let me know if anything is dumb about my analysis please!

Good analysis but I think you've stopped one step short.

All-in has an EV of roughly 0.44 units (I believe the units are %ofprizepool when you use ICM %EV mode). To determine whether this is optimal you will need to evaluate the EV of raising to call sb/fold to btn and bb, and compare. This would involve going through the game tree step by step with some assumptions about continuing ranges and evaluating your fold equity at each street and equity at showdowns then converting the chip gains and losses to $EV. Perhaps a solver can do this for you.

You could also look at other lines like raising to fold to all 3 players, raising to call off sb or bb, etc.