Can 'getting it in good' be bad?

FromHereOn

FromHereOn

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Hey all,

I'm still trying to connect some dots within MIT poker, the ICM, and other tournament strategy. I'm beginning to get the picture that there's a "tournament EV line" where a hand may be ahead, but stack size or equity can make a fold the better option despite being more probable to win.

An example was a hand at 24BB vs the table leader at 80BB (yeah, it was a freeroll). Post-flop he was drawing a flush with one overcard while I had middle pair. My suspicion was correct and I 3bet all-in just less than the pot. When I ran the hand on a calculator:

Hero: 58%
Villain: 42%

In a cash world 'I got it in with the better hand' was an easy adage to subscribe to, but can somebody help me with which strategy illustrates the type of equity where this is a better fold in a tournament? Please also let me know if I'm misunderstanding ICM, and my shove was right EV move.

Thanks for your advice!
 
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WiZZiM

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Hey all,

I'm still trying to connect some dots within MIT poker, the ICM, and other tournament strategy. I'm beginning to get the picture that there's a "tournament EV line" where a hand may be ahead, but stack size or equity can make a fold the better option despite being more probable to win.

An example was a hand at 24BB vs the table leader at 80BB (yeah, it was a freeroll). Post-flop he was drawing a flush with one overcard while I had middle pair. My suspicion was correct and I 3bet all-in just less than the pot. When I ran the hand on a calculator:

Hero: 58%
Villain: 42%

In a cash world 'I got it in with the better hand' was an easy adage to subscribe to, but can somebody help me with which strategy illustrates the type of equity where this is a better fold in a tournament? Please also let me know if I'm misunderstanding ICM, and my shove was right EV move.

Thanks for your advice!

Few flaws with your thinking here.

firstly, ICM really is only used for push/fold situations, generally shorter stacks. Now you can use ICM in mtts, but you want to use Cev mode (chip expected value) not, $ev($ expected value). You use Cev until you get near or reach the final table in where the money jumps are huge, and in SNG games like for example a 9 man SNG, you will want to use $ev from the start of the tournament.

The reason why the two differ is that one jsut computes the amount of chips you are expected to win, the other factors in the size of your stack, compares it to others in the tournament and assigns a value to that stack of chips, this is your equity you refer too.

Now when you say you ran the hand postflop vs your opponants one hand, you missed the fact that we don't actually know his hand, we want to use equity of our hand, vs his RANGE of hands. Just because you are correct in this spot, does not mean he has that hand all the time, so we have to put him on a range, then do calculations based on that range.


Example to help you grasp when folding an edge might be better than taking one.

lets say you have 10 BB in an mtt and someone shoves into your BB and you know his range is roughly "x". your hand may be a 55% favourite to win this hand, meaning you should call because you are all about taking flips, and slight favourites since there is no $ev involved here. But really, if we use our common sense, it's an MTT in which we need many thousands of chips to make it to the final table, with only 10BB being far away from the final table money, we have to take risks in order to get a big stack, so taking these thin edges is a great idea if we think our hand is ahead of his range.

Now lets take the same example in a 9 man SNG, you get the same 55%, but we're 4 handed and we're on the bubble. Now like above, the 55% means we will win chips over the long haul if we make the same call, but in SNG we're not as concerned with chips, we're concerned with making the money a high %, so in this case we would want to be folding, for a few reasons.

1. There is an ICM tax in play. This basically means when we call here, we throw away equity to other people at the table for free. I'll link you to a post i made about this afterward which will explain it.

2. We can make the money with like 3bb we don't need a huge amount of chips to be able to make money in these games, there is only 13500 chips in play, so we really don't need to be taking risks.

3. We make money from other people getting into confrontation. It's pretty sweet when we can fold, and then next hand watch two players go all in vs each other and spew equity to other players at the table and we make the money without doing anything.

4. That 55% isn't an accurate representation of how much we need to win to overcome the ICM tax involved. Again i'll link you to another post which i made which covers how to calc this tax. But it usually means we need to be making 3-5% more equity in general for calling to be profitable.

5. Programs like ICMizer and SNG wizard are designed to help with all these decisions, however you really need to learn how they work and what they calculate for them to be truly helpful to you. They are essentially calculators and using them incorrectly means you are training yourself to play badly.

6. There is usually more time and you can blind down far lower in SNG, as mentioned earlier we can cash this game if we have 1 chip at the table, it's possible that we can still make money. So this basically means the game you are playing dictates sometimes the amount of risk you need to take on.

Hope this helps in some way, i'll try and find those posts and link them tommorow.
 
FromHereOn

FromHereOn

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Hope this helps in some way, i'll try and find those posts and link them tommorow.

Thanks for so much input. I'm gathering the following:

-Even though I was the aggressor shoving on a marginally better hand post-flop, there's an ICM tax that makes that move not affordable. I jammed knowing that my final bet of about 15BB didn't have enough fold equity, and I would be called (which means once I c-bet post-flop [HU, out of position] I needed to fold rather than go over the top).

-There were about 200 left in the tourney when I made the move. I imagine that doubling up into 48BB wasn't worth risking my tournament life on a "58%" hand according to the CEM.
 
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WiZZiM

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no i was trying to explain the differance. Basically put, in SNG you want to be thinking more about ICM but in MTT's forget about it and focus on accumulating chips. Doubling in an MTT to 48bb is totally worth taking on, however put the same situation in a 9 man SNG and it likely won't be.
 
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