[PrayingMantis]

[ QUOTE ]
Can ICM give you the answer?

[/ QUOTE ]

ICM does not give you answers, you give the answers (I'm not sure that you fully understand what ICM means, but OK).

ICM is just a very helpful model to use for certain equity calculations. Of course it is not "all" that is important, but nothing that you say change the extreme +$EVness of using it as an important assumption about aspects of the game.

BTW, you can say, for instance, some similar things about "pot-odds in NL", or any other mathematical concept with regard to the game. Of course "pot-odds in NL" are very far from being the only thing that matters, and sometimes there are much more important things (if you think about NL ring only in terms of pot-odds, without considering any other thing, you are missing big parts of the game and can never be a very good player). So "Pot odds" won't "give you answers", but there are many many situations in which thinking in terms of "pot odds" is very helfpul, and not doing so is clearly -EV.

Of course the difference is that ICM might be wrong altogether (it doesn't look so), but you don't seem to be interested in this possibility at all. Actually, you have titled your post "Challenging the basics behind ICM", while in fact you haven't challenged even one small basic idea behind this model, you only talk about why intuition is better and such, but you don't seem to understand that there's no contradiction at all between using intuition and using ICM. I suggest getting a somewhat deeper understanding of this model before trying to "challenge its basics".