$2.5 NLHE MTT Turbo: ICM Spot: 180 $2.50 Four Handed

https://www.weaktight.com/h/55a5ddc6d39043c3418b468e

Are we calling here with K4o? Villian seems okay, haven't seen him get out of line and seems to be playing pretty standard.

1st $123
2nd $82
3rd $46
4th $30

I'm never folding here. Villian is the shortest stack with 6bb, I'm pretty sure he's pushing the whole deck here, and K4 is a great hand. He might be pushing 80% of the deck if he's too tight. You are losing much more chips by folding than by calling. If you fold villian's going to have almost your stack, and you have a great opportinuty to knock him out and get into the fight for the first place. You will have a 60/40 in your favour most of the times.

Seems like a good spot to run through an ICM calculator and get a feel for what we can call vs certain ranges.

I don't really know what not getting out of line and playing standard means, but it kind of seems like he's on the tighter side of things. If that's the case it makes it much closer, but from a pure logic standpoint we should be calling very wide here as the benefits of winning the pot and knocking this player out will likely outweigh the negatives if we call and lose. Having said that, we're not exactly super short yet, but our table position is not the best as we will have to jam into two large stacks in future situations.

best thing to do here is see what our calling range vs a 60% jam range looks like, if Kx Qx type hands are calls, then we just know this is easily a great call spot. I suspect vs a 60% range we will be around a slight positive call, but it's been so long since i've done ICM calcs that i really don't trust it anymore

(gonna go run this one shortly)

cool ran it, it seems like i'm a bit off..... all Kx Qx are super profitable calls, so if he gets even wider than 60% it becomes even better for us.

I'm reminded of a thing in game you can use (feel free to test this) whenever you have an opponant who is 5BB you can call with with around the same range he shoves, in this case he's a little more than that, so we tighten from his range a little, but it's a really cool trick to help you find around the right decision in game... assuming you know his jam range. In this exact case if he jams 60% we can call with 48%, with less BB it becomes around even, and when he's really short we can call with more hands that he jams with. This is also dependant on the stack relations in play, but as a general rule it can't be too wrong to use unless you are in extreme bubble situations.

Yeah, I ran it through the calculator as well and got the same result.

The problem I'm having is that I don't understand the mechanics of ICM. There's a video I have I could rewatch. Like I can plug the numbers and get the right result but I don't understand the principals as well as I need to.

I know that the chips you have are worth more than the chip you can. It's a way to put in math how often you make money vs lose money compared to Chip EV.

But I get stuck in game sometimes. The 5bb rule is interesting.

Also what else should I be focusing on for my 180s grind? I'm getting really happy with my calling ranges (pre ICM) been working on loosening those up a bit. What other concepts are important as you work your way up?

two biggest things most people miss or think they are good at but are not...

Jamming wide enough/calling wide enough.
ICM decisions final table.
Getting a big stack and then putting relentless pressure on the table once you have it.
Putting it all together as the main goal of playing these games is to be able to mass table them, as huge volume is where the money is, the thing most people don't realize is that it takes work on a lot of differant levels to be able to play many tables profitably.

Those are the biggest things i usually see players doing incorrectly, but obviously without knowing anything about your game i can't really say...

Okay cool, I'm actually working on the first two right now. With relentless pressure you just jam wider pre right?

How do you get good at the ranges for that? How much volume do you consider mass volume? I can get about 10 tables or so without it affecting my play but it drops a bit after that.

You can jam, but with a bigger stack, you can also use the min-raise to your advantage really effectively. You can also min-raise with intentions of calling shorter stacks and folding to larger ones to avoid big all in confrontations when you have a nice stack.

Getting good at ranges for me is just working with ICM calcs, and looking for very common situations and looking for the differing variables and how it affects your equity in the tournament. It's mostly common sense when you think about it and try to not worry about getting everything perfect because it all relies on accurate ranges given to opponants which we never really know. The best way imo is to develop a training plan, and work on 1 thing everyday before you start playing, This helps you retain the information on a daily basis, rather than overwhelming yourself with info/ranges and you forgetting half of them.

mass volume again depends on your personal situation. But the best grinders are 15-30 tabling and are playing 100's of tournaments a day. For me, my goal was to always play my max table count, this depends on a lot of differing things, but mainly it depends on how much you need to think about decisions in game, and how much you are automating decisions. This does not mean you are not adjusting to opponants, but you should be making things as simple as possible in game, as you have 2-10 seconds per decision. The other things that help you gain speed are table setups/ hotkeys/ having a decent computer/ internet speed etc. But the main reason i want to play my maximum table count is that you can play less total hours in a day while still putting in plenty of volume, this will all really just help with you making $/hour instead of focusing on ROI's. If you can, while you run down 180 mans it's always a good idea to load some other games to keep your table count up, i generally loaded up a few hyper turbo sngs while my main games closed down, just so i wasn't wasting too much time.

Yes my max in hyper turbos for example is 12, as soon as i go past that my ROI drops off rapidly. But there's always room to add more, you just need to get quicker/better at making decisions, a lot of this comes from experience, but you can try some of the things mentioned above to help you speed up the process a bit, like everything else, the more you put into the game the more you get out of it.