Making this thread out of frustration at today's result.

Made final 3 in fullring turbo SnG. I had 9000 chips, other two players had 2000 and 2250. Blinds were 75/150 and then 100/200. So they were shortstacked and shoving wide and often.

At one point the SB shoves and I call with A8 suited. He has AJ and doubles up. Bad luck I guess.

Few hands later the other guy shoves from the button and I call with A5 off-suit, and he has A9 and I double him up!

So we're now at around 4000-4500 each. Eventually I go out in 3rd, having been the overwhelming chip leader ... so annoying!! Was I wrong to call those two hands? Bearing in mind I had already folded to multiple shoves from both players while I waited for a better hand to call with.

Post is pretty results orientated. Whether or not you should be calling here depends largely on what exactly 'shoving wide and often' constituted. We don't have anyway of knowing exactly how wide your opponents were shoving as we can't see the last 20 or so hands you played against them. You should have had a pretty good feel for how wide they were shoving though and if it felt like you were constantly getting shoved on both of them then both these calls are probably correct. Both your opponents have about 10bbs and should be shoving much wider than just raggy aces and low pps.

That's what I thought. I just wanted reassurance really I guess, that in a 3-player game you should (GENERALLY) be calling small-stack-shoves with A5off. So annoying to go from 9k chips to a 3rd place finish.

not necessarily. most contests unless the players are really experienced they play way too tight on their move ins. with most of the chips you could let them break one of the other first if they are moving all the time. especially if the money moves up.

and with them selecting their move in hands your a,5 is likely to be only a small favorite if that.

I agree I probably should have let one of them eliminate the other.

Disagree on inexperienced players being tight in later stages of low stakes SnGs though. In my experience, most shove a very wide range (if anything, too wide) once they get down to around 15BBs or less.

then you should certainly wait for one to get broke.

If you can do use an icm tool set with the correct payouts for the game and also most importantly fill in the ranges you think the opponents have. Don't rely on any automatic ranges think it through, also if for eg stacks are very imbalanced there may be some dynamic not caught by the tool/algorithm so use some common sense and adjust if necessary. Also try playing around with the ranges/stacks to see how it affects the output.

Practice at this on old hands will help judging future situations when seated at the tables.