Hi guys,

I've been trying out ICMIZER sng coach.
Can anyone please explain this?
Pokerstars 9man turbo.


4 ppl left, 400/800. 2 blinds left in bb.

How on earth can this be a fold? I feel kinda stupid like I don't see something everyone else does?

This strikes nobody as weird? How can cards even matter in this spot? Getting 3000:800 vs leaving us with less than one blind, folding is more ev?

As you study more, you will realise that ICM will force you to make some very tight folds.

In this spot, you should fold the bottom 30% or so of hands ACCORDING TO ICM. However, ICM has several limitations, one of them being that it doesn't simulate future hands at all. If you fold this hand, then next hand you will have to call all in from the SB. The reason ICM wants you to fold so much is that with very bad hands you have very low equity ~30% vs the openers range who isn't super wide in this case and it isn't taking into account you being all in with atc next hand.

ICMiser does have the ability to simulate future hands, so I bet if you ran it through there again, simulating 1 future hand then you will find this is a call with 95-100% of hands.

Hope this makes sense to you.

Thank you. Much clearer, yes.
However, in this very spot it seems very misleading?
cEV it's negative but folding must be -$ev?
Given circumstances, 3 payouts and other stack sizes and blinds, can we ever fold here?
If the correct play is to fold here on the bubble, I think I have a huge leak.

And thank you for taking your time.

Hi

For quite some time now, by default ICMIZER chooses the good FGS depth setting for SNG Coach which depends on the number of players at the table.
This hand was calculated with FGS 3, so we are looking 3 hands ahead letting the blinds make the full circle.

We get this result with Future Game Simulations (depth 3):



The fun thing is that in this particular spot FGS with depth 3+ doesn't drive us too far away from ICM:



ICM is not an intuitive thing, it has to be learned.
And we are on the bubble and the 9 max SNG bubble is pretty strict.
So yes folding trash hands is the right play mathematically.

Simulating 1 hand ahead when we are playing 4-way is not the recommended number. I recommend to take at least full circle if possible, so the depth should be N players - 1, which for 4 players is 3. If we just look 1 hand ahead all we see is that we post SB, which isn't great. As we look at the hands where we get to the Button or CO things become to look better, and fold becomes a better alternative again.

To give you an idea why folding is not that bad with trash hands lets look just 1 hand ahead and look at the worst hands of the next 3 for us, where we are on SB:

As you can see, both CO and BTN should be pushing quite some hands if they are good, and the player on the BB has a chance to call them.
If such confrontation happens, our stack gets us ITM with nice probability.
If it's folded to us, we push and stay alive with 50% probability.
If we win, next 2 hands are quite good for us with the other short stack being pressured on the BB.
FGS 3 sees that all (unlike FGS1) and that is why our range again becomes tighter if we are using other FGS depth values than 1.

Q, I know I am not the OP, but I appreciate that reply. Beautiful stuff.

As the OP I just Saw I forgot to answer this thread... So sloppy, but yes. Such a gold answer. Tysm.

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Thanks, appreciate your positive feedback

Great information Q, and awesome that you are posting in this forum!

To the untrained ICM eye this may look weird. In reality there are many counter intuitive spots.