How much $EV will you give up?

[adanthar]

You're missing the forest for the trees. Loss of FE is one of several factors but by no means the only one, and they are not even all quantifiable.

A weird example that should still intuitively make sense: It's an hour into an SNG with 300/600 blinds and, through an amazing coincidence involving eight way all ins preflop, the chip stacks look like this:

SB: 7000
You (BB): 2992
8 other people: 1 chip apiece

It's folded to the SB, who goes all in with two cards or possibly one card. You have aces. What do you do?

In this situation, I don't even have to look at the ICM to know it will say to fold, as will eastbay's tool. And yet, if you fold, three things will happen:

1)You will lose this 600 chips and the next 300 on the SB
2)The short stacks will sometimes bust and sometimes double up to 2, 4, or 8 chips while the blinds circle the table faster and faster and you keep folding every hand
3)You will eventually wind up all in with the luckiest short stack in a race for third while the big stack laughs at you and wins

So, of course you have to call. FE here is a non-factor except as to the big stack, and since he'll still have 4K chips left when he loses you won't be able to bust him before you hit HU. But guess what? In the meantime, you'll have done the same to him and taken away a lot more chips than just the ones you won with the aces.

Going back to the QJ hand, in other words, the reason QJ is not close is because of the winning percentage it has against a likely calling range. Against a certain opponent who folds Q9o but calls K8o, it's not so good because it will never be over 40-45% to win when you are called. Against almost everyone else, you either have way too much FE *or* are closer to even or favored in a flip that will give you even more FE when you do win it.

That's about as much as I'm ever going to write on this subject until I publish a book about it. If you don't get it from here, start by figuring out exactly why it is a bad idea to open push AK in level 1.

[FatalError]

i frequently decide to push with any 2 in this spot, or any 2 without a duece or trey

[Moonsugar]

No, I am asking how much HYPOTHETICAL $EV ACCORDING TO ICM you would give up. Are you saying that whenever ICM gives you -$EV result it is never worth pushing no matter what the blind situation is or how much FE I will lose?

I am trying to get some insight on ways to modify ICM for the blinds.

[Izverg04]

I doubt anyone will give you a credible answer. I'd say 0.01-0.015 of the prize pool is the typical range if you expect a large increase of the FE but I am just pulling that number out of you-know-what.

[Moonsugar]

[ QUOTE ]
Y

A weird example that should still intuitively make sense: It's an hour into an SNG with 300/600 blinds and, through an amazing coincidence involving eight way all ins preflop, the chip stacks look like this:

SB: 7000
You (BB): 2992
8 other people: 1 chip apiece

It's folded to the SB, who goes all in with two cards or possibly one card. You have aces. What do you do?

In this situation, I don't even have to look at the ICM to know it will say to fold,

[/ QUOTE ]

You should have looked. ICM says call. And to use your favorite pharase: IT IS EASY.

Can't wait for the book, it should be as enlightening as all your other drivel. LOL.

[Phil Van Sexton]

[ QUOTE ]
I am trying to get some insight on ways to modify ICM for the blinds.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was working on this a few weeks ago myself.

I wrote a program to compare ICM to actual results in the tournaments I have, and then grouping the results into categories so I might see where the ICM was most wrong.

One report that I did was to compare ICM to actual results for the various positions in 4-handed hands. This contains about 10,000 hands from 400 tournaments (I think). I computed these results for all 4-handed hands, for all 4 players (not just me).

****NOTE: These numbers are really worthless due to small sample size, but I figured that I would post them and let you draw your own conclusions. It may also motivate me to finish this ICM project, and maybe get me some volunteers to send me hand histories to help my sample.


According to this, the ICM overvalues your $EV by 0.007 when you are about to post the BB. This is 0.7% or $7 in a 100/9 tournament.

Even though your question was about UTG, the ICM numbers are really "what will my $EV be AFTER this hand if fold or win". Therefore, you should be looking at the BB number in these charts.



Broken down by blind level. I believe this shows the effect of my small sample size.

[adanthar]

Being sleepy this morning, I managed to botch the ICM calc three times, and on the fourth time around, I admit that the ICM does say to call aces. Of course, it also says to fold kings in a not particularly close fashion (61.17 vs. 59.32 in a $100 SNG). So, if your strategy in this spot is to hope to get exactly aces, the ICM works great!

Talk about forest for the trees again...yeah, time for the ignore list.

[microbet]

When you do an ICM calc against a range of calling hands, you pick what you think is the most likely range and go with that.

I think in some cases you would get a vastly different answer if you had the flexibility to put the opponent on a weighted range of calling ranges.

I think this is relevant to the idea in your post that you will sometimes have more than enough FE because the range is too tight and sometimes be +$EV because you are ahead of your opponents range.

[Moonsugar]

Thanks. I thought I was going crazy and no one would ever understand what I was trying to ask. This info is helpful. Will send my data to you if you want.

I guess I suck at english.

[Moonsugar]

Ignore me. Thats fine.

Go ahead and keep trying to win @ 2+2 message boarding. I concede that anyways.

I will try to better my poker.