Ask Anything on Shove-Fold Poker and ICMizer

Generally playing shove-fold with a deeper stack like 25bb has the most purpose when you're mid-stacked and up against good players who cover you and would jam very wide over a small raise to apply pressure.

If you're the short stack, you generally have less to lose relative to the mid stacks and don't have to be quite as risk-averse calling it off.

I would also never open-shove a 30bb+ effective stack. For me at least, the risk-reward ratio isn't good enough even with an ante.

Its also worth considering, that open shoving takes away the possibility of postflop play and therefore also positional advantage. This is a good thing, if we are in SB, so in that situation we should be more inclined to open jam relatively deep. But if we are on BTN, we should be much more inclined to make a small open, since we then get to play postflop in position, if someone just call.

From the other seats its more of a mixed bag, since we can still get called by the blinds and play in position. We can however also get called by someone with position on us. So if we have a loose and deep stacked player to our left, that can be an incentive to open jam rather than put in a small raise and have to play a lot of pots against him out of position.

Those are very good points Fundiver.

I think that it makes sense then to have different shove-fold threshold stacks depending on a number of factors in addition to just pay-jumps and effective stack, including the type of players left to act and our position.

Occasionally min-raising at 8bb might be the best option, and also so could shoving at a 25bb effective stack. (I still think that deeper than this it would rarely be your best play to shove first in due to poor risk/reward.) But in between with stacks like 15bb, if you want to get max edge, you should consider a lot of these listed factors instead of just going on defaults.

IDntEatFsh said:

I have a question about ICMIzer & the SNG Coach element specifically.

I am totally new to this tool and I am interested to know how to make the most of it.

How is it supposed to work, you answer lots of questions and over time you develop an increasingly conscious 'intuition' of the right play? I can see that working, maybe, but slowly? Is there some good theory I can learn alongside that will help? Or a suggested approach to incorporating the sng coach into a study plan?

It's VERY possible I am completely missing the point, in which case I welcome being set straight.

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Hey, that's a very good question.
Let's start with the 1st alternative, just playing without ICMIZER or SNG Coach.
Since we have no way to mathematically assess our play we have very slim options of improving and making sure our strategy changes are for the good and not for the bad.

Let's throw ICMIZER in the mix for option 2 - we can now check different situations we had or expect to have in the future to find the optimal strategy. Once we know the strategy we can start moving towards it - generally intuitively, yes.
We can build fixed push fold tables and approximate them to our situation at the table by knowing how additional potential callers in front of us adjust our push range width etc.
However, the process of setting up hands can be somewhat hard. We can auto analyze hands that we've played but it's not easy to see or check if we actually learned something and improved our skills.

So we get to the 3rd option with SNG Coach. Compared to the 2nd option here we can get a test to our skills. On top of that SNG Coach displays the relative strength of our strategy based on skill zones, so you can see if you have trouble as a medium stack or as big stack, etc. Here you can quickly see where the weaknesses are because of this grouped rating view feature. If you can answer correctly questions from SNG Coach, your rating goes up and it can be an indicator that you will be making better decisions during the game due to the similarity of the studying & playing processes.

How to make it as fast as possible? I guess no one can know the answer to this question. It's clearly will depend on time spent studying in SNG Coach and your brain's ability to build an intuitive strategy based on the results you're seeing and examples you're solving.
Everyone is different so something that worked for someone else may not work for you.

I have an idea though, how about this. You practice your tournament in the SNG Coach for one month, for example by answering 2000+ random questions. After that come back here and give your feedback, did you improve, and how. And what seems to be not working.

I'd be glad to jump in and give some advice based on your actual practical experience. We will be able to see gauges of your rating and where you were able to improve the most, for example, that will help us in finding the best adjustments to the studying process.

johnnylawford said:

Here's an example I come across regularly:

Pokerstars $1.10 satellite to $11 Bounty Builder (Hyper Turbo 1R1A)
55 seats awarded
70 players left
Blinds and Antes: 10,000/5,000/1,000
Current stack: 85,000
Avg. Stack: 110,000
Next level: 12,000/6,000 (<1 min)
Structure: Blinds increasing every 3 minutes

What would be your opening range here and would it always be push/fold?

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Thank you for posting

Have you seen the Dara O'Kearney's ask me anything on satties thread here?

Also Dara's book on Sattie strat has some in game- what he calls Gorilla maths- that help with decisions like the above example.

Kindle version is 8.99 USD on amazon a steal at that price.

Hope this helps

If anyone has specific questions about ICMIZER Valentin will be happy to answer them here:

ICMIZER - Tournament Preflop Calculator, SNG Coach - Push/Fold Trainer Software

He is also offering a nice discount to CardsChat members!

Hi guys,

Not sure how active this thread is but came across it earlier when I was looking through Dara's AMA.

Just wanted to ask about a hand. 3 paid in a normal SNG format:

CO (51bb) folds
BTN (12bb) raises to 2bb
SB (12bb) shoves
Action to hero (9.5bb)

I was really surprised that A8s is a pretty profitable call here for me in this spot since the 12bb stacks could potentially knock each other out here. Is this purely because the BTN's call off range is so tight considering we're shorter?

Thanks

Don't know if you still answer questions here but what are typical adjustments you make to players ranges such as the default call and overcall ranges, Ie are players typical 20% tighter or some such compared to the ICM or Nash call? I've been watching some training by Wasserman and often his adjustments for even skilled players result in major changes in the calling/reshove ranges.