Cheesy Christmas compilation post

This the time of year when the Man tries to get us to buy David Essex's Songs of Love or Daniel O'Donnell's "Songs With Mary In The Title", so why should I be different. What follows is just a compilation of some recent stuff I've dreamt up on Boards or in private conversation.

First, some thoughts on big stack strategy arising from a conversation I had with Thomas Maguire on the subject. Basically most of the books say you should loosen up and attack relentlessly with the big stack on the basis that other people will be afraid to play back at you (same books also advise keeping out of the way of the big stack in these situations).

That's fine if that holds - that people will only play back with AA or KK - but it never does in Ireland in my experience. Irish poker players may have a lot of faults, but being afraid to stick their chips in when it's obvious someone is bullying is not one of them. ICM tells us that when you're a big stack:
(1) any additional chips you win are worth less (in tournament equity terms) than any chips you lose
(2) any chips you lose to a small stack are worth way more to them than they are to you

I think this indicates that the correct strategy is to continue picking your spots carefully with a big stack, only making moves against players who won't play back without a premium hand, and only getting involved with hands likely to be best otherwise. This has the added advantage that since you're not obviously bullying, you're less exploitable by a risk averse smaller stack. At different points at the FT in Drogheda, two other players had enormous chip leads, and both went out before the 5 way chop. Once I took the lead I tried to make it clear they'd have to be prised away from me chip by chip. Once the others realised this, they saw they were in a situation where they'd have to gamble with each other if they didn't agree to a chop. This is also how I played the giant stack I was gifted with at the start of the recent Fitz side event final table: I took no real risks until we got 4 handed. I've seen a number of others blow huge chipleads by being too laggy in these spots, so I'm convinced it's strategically wrong.

Second part of this post relates to ICM, arising from this post Macspower made on Boards.

ICM calculation is as follows: If you fold, your tournament equity is $402.If you call and lose, you bust out in 5th for $185, so you've lost $217 effectively.If you call and win, your equity rises to $558, a gain of $156.So effectively, by calling, you're risking $217 trying to win $156, so you're getting effective tournament odds of approximately 5/7 (156/217 to be exact), so you need to be a 7/5 favourite for this to be a good call.

However, you're almost certainly not going to be able to do the detailed ICM calculations at the table in real time. This is why bubble factor is a useful concept. If you do a lot of these ICM calculations offline, you quickly get an intuitive sense for the bubble factor (the ratio of how much chips won are worth to how much chips lost are worth, which is therefore the ratio you have to multiply pot odds by to get your true tournament equity odds) in different typical situations. Sometimes it's easy (bubble factor is always 1 headsup, and is equal to the number of tickets being given out in a satellite on the bubble when stacks are equal), but most times you'll have to make an educated guess based on experience gained from doing lots of these calculations. When I read Mac's post, before I did the calculations, I guessed that the bubble factor was a little under 1.5. So if I had been Mac, I'd have called if I guessed myself to be 60% against the guy's shoving range, folded otherwise. Even being aware that bubble factor exists gives you an edge in tournaments. You'd be amazed how many players think it's correct to call when you're getting 6/4 and are 40% against someone's range. It almost never is late in a tournament (because bubble factor is always more than 1) before the headsup stage.

The edge of good online STT players mostly boils down to the correct strategic application of ICM, and this also is the biggest edge an MTT player typically has deep into an MTT.To put it in concrete terms, anyone who thinks it would be correct for Mac to call if he's approximately 50% against the shover's range "because I'm getting the pot odds" is making a mistake that will cost them over $30 (in the long run). Without an understanding of the implications of ICM and bubble factor, you'll make these mistakes over and over and cost yourself a lot of money in the long run.

I believe Mellor is preparing to write a definitive piece on ICM for the board so I'll leave it to him. In the mean time, anyone wishing to read up on it, there's a very good section on it in Chen's "The Maths of Poker", an even better examination of it that develops the more practically useful concept of "bubble factor" in "Kill Everyone", plus there's a small bit on it in one of Harrington's tourney books (specifically in relation to satellite bubbles, where ICM becomes so important that even if you think someone is pushing ATC you can generally only call a push with AA or KK), and also some good stuff in Moshman's "Sit n Go Strategy".

Right, off to Cavan.

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