blonde poker forum

In these next few posts I'm going to explain what ICM is, how we use it, why we need it, and give a first lesson in using a program called sitngo wiz.

If at any point it becomes sickeningly patronizing, please assume that's some sort of ironic comedy thing I'm going for. :)



First things First

First of all, a couple of definitions...

Defⁿ : Fuddie duddie

If you play online poker tournaments that involve sitting and/or going, and you do not know, or have not previously been interested in, this ICM thing that all the kidz seem to rave about, then you are a "fuddie duddie" and this post is for you.  :D

Defⁿ : ICM

ICM is short for independant chip modelling.
It is a mathematical* model that attempts to assign a cash value to each of your tournament chips. When relative stack sizes are low in relation to the blinds, sitngo players typically use this model to help evaluate which pre-flop decision will maximize their equity.


Don't worry, all will be explained.





Equity

Imagine you are halfway through playing a sitngo and you want to stop. You've just found Jesus and he's convinced you that gambling is a horrible sin.

We could log off and go immediately to hang out with Jesus and help sick people and wotnot, but we've paid good money to buy in to this sitngo and being wasteful is also a sin.

As luck should have it, our fallen brother Jeramijah is on hand and recognizes this predicament. He kindly offers to buy this tournament from us. (Jesus is right there and he ok's that minor breaches in a poker site's terms and conditions isn't really a sin) He'll give us some cash for our seat, continue to play in our place, and in return he'll pocket any winnings from the tournament.

The question is, what would be the fairest price to charge Jeramijah for this privilege? We paid £100 to enter the tournament so how about £100?
The problem is what if we have already lost some chips? Jeramijah would be getting a rough deal for his £100 and Jesus would be cross.
What if we have already won some chips? Jeramijah would be short changing us if he only paid £100 and that's not what we want.
What if we had neither gained, nor lost chips, but so many players have been knocked out that we are in the money already, or very close to being in the money. Again £100 would not be a good price to give up our seat to Jeramijah.

So Jesus phones up his omniscient friend Dan and explains the predicament.

Dan is a helpful fellow so he freezes time, gets the bus over there, and takes his poker playing puppet Polly out of his toolbox.
He has Polly play the tournament from that point. When Polly is finished, Dan notes the amount of money Polly cashed for (between £0 for no cash and £500 for first place) in his special notepad. He then rewinds time to the point where Polly first took over (he's a clever man in Dan) and presses play, so that Polly can finish the sitngo again.

Dan repeats this process again and again until Polly has finished the sitngo five million squillion billion times. He puts Polly back in his box, and after turning back the clock one last time, declares that a fair price for Jeramijah to pay for taking over this tournament is the total amount that Polly cashed for overall divided by five million squillion billion.

This figure is our equity in the tournament at that point.





Back to ICM

We don't have a toolbelt or a bus pass or any of the other special things that Dan has to work out what our equity would be to such a high degree of accuracy. Instead we have ICM.

ICM helps us to estimate our equity in a tournament at any given point.

It's based on our stack size relative to all the other stack sizes in play, and from that the model estimates our percentage chance of finishing in each position. (eg, 1st, 2nd or 3rd etc) After it has assigned these percentages, if the model knows what each place pays (or doesn't pay) it's one last quick and relatively easy sum to work out what our equity might be.





Note

* I mentioned the word 'mathematical' back there, and that's where a lot of people understandably switch off.

Your fuddie duddie might argue that...

-Poker isn't all about crunching numbers and complicated theortical mathematics. It's a game of psychology, of cunning, of mental toughness and all sorts of other things that don't involve algebra.

-Any mathematical model you have is going to be fraught with problems and won't really help in the real world.

Rather than argue these points, I'm going to agree whole heartedly with the fuddie duddie. He has too strong a case. Poker certainly is a rich and complex game, there are many succseful players who are not number crunching boffins, ICM certainly does have it's limits, and it won't really help us all that much in the real world when we sit down and play a poker tournament.

So why all the fuss?

Is we look at things like this, we can move forward and maybe learn something new without upsetting our well established world view.







Coming soon

Coming very soon in fact, I'll be finishing this three post series tonight, in between trips to my fridge.

In the next post. I'll look at the applications of ICM and how we use it to make more money playing sitngos. I'll look at why we need ICM. The benefits of it, and some of its problems and limitations.

In the final post I'll walk through how to manually enter a hand into a program called sitngo wiz and how to go about playing around and experimenting with ICM to "hone your instincts" and increase the chances that you'll make better decisions while playing sitngos.
Hopefully the hand I choose will be a one that will demonstrates an instance where our intuition can lead us to make the "wrong" move, and thusly convince all and sundry to join the cult.

sweet, i've never understood how to use wiz properly

LOL, enjoying the dummies style guide, very well done. I have always had difficulty explaining ICM to other people. Look forward to the rest!

Fair play, I'm sure many will appreciate these posts, and 99% of ppl (obv everyone bar Longy) will be able to learn something.

Best equity explanation ever!!

Cheers Tank.

Signed F Duddie.

It must be bloody good, I understand it.

so good, eagerly awaiting part 2 & 3 so that i can steal them and reproduce

ICM, as we recall from the last post, is simply a mathmatical model that lets us estimate the equity our stack has at any given point in a sitngo. To understand why this brought about a strategic revolution in the way we think about sitngos, perhaps it's best if I first explain a little of the history.

What we already knew about sitngos before all this ICM stuff came along.

Sklansky talks about the 'gap concept' in his theory of poker, of requiring a better hand to call a raise with than we need to put in the raise ourselves. This is due to our chances of picking up the pot immediately when it's us who's doing the raising.
We know that this 'gap' is signifacantly widened in tournament poker where more than one place is paid, because of the disparity between the gain in our equity when we win chips and the reduction in our equity when we lose chips.

Even if we don't follow the mathematical logic, we've definately all absorbed through our collective cultural consiousness the practical consequences of this. Namely that we can raise with mince, but we need the goods to call.

In sitngos, with the ever increasing blind structure, people's stack sizes in terms of the number of big blinds they have goes down and down, and the number of chips available to win uncontested each hand if you raise and everybody else folds goes up and up.

So while everyone is getting gradually more and more desperate, the potential rewards of putting in a pre flop raise get more and more tempting.

Before long, we reach the point whereby any reasonably sized raise (ie, 2.5 or 3 times the big blind) will involve us putting a quarter of our stack in the middle and commiting us to the pot.

Note : Players still do sometimes fold pre-flop after they've raise a quarter of their stack (or more!)
Even some winning players do this (it's almost always a leak when they do) We're not going to, and are proceeding with the belief that it's weak, it's a leak and that we are to just say no!
Anybody who thinks otherwise, please see me after class.

Raising and calling a re-raise is an option, but generally players will reraise you with cards that they wouldn't call you with had you gone all-in pre flop. We might know we're never going to fold, but they think there's still a chance. They're using Sklansky's gap concept too!

Most of the time we would much prefer to pick up the nice pot that contains just the blinds and antes, rather than flip a coin for our tournament life. To discourage your opponents from reraising you then, we just go all-in straight away. They now can't kid themselves that there's any chance of them winning t'pot without beating your ass in a showdown. They have to tighten up accordingly, and we get our wish of winning an uncontested pot more often.


Pushbots

Pushbotting, this strategy became known as. The bot being short for robot, ie the sitngo player employing this strategy is just playing robotically.
 
The desicion the pushbot has to make on each hand looked really simple, you either went all-in or you folded. (If someone else had gone all-in before you, you could call or you could fold.) Other poker professionals would look down on the push botter, "it's not proper poker" they would remark. I was a pushbotter for a long time and it never used to bother me. I was making money playing some sort of 52 card game, I wasn't too bothered what people called it.

Other players at the table would get frustrated by the push bot; I recall an angry chatbox comment made in my direction back in 2006 "Do you want to actually play some poker?"

"Ok" I replied, "but let's finish this sitngo first."


Enough guff about the good old days; you'll be pining for the Tribeca network next. Tell me about ICM ffs.

I do beg your pardon, buisness will be resumed.
Sigh, this might take more than 3 posts.

Anyway, the pushbot strategy that sitngos necessitated was hardly the highly complex, multi faceted, minute to learn, lifetime to master beast that 'proper poker' puports to be. There was only one desicion, to push or to fold. Nevertheless a decision is still a descision, and any descion depends on...



Factors!

Yes, the factors. Where would we be without them in poker? (it depends)

When weighing up whether to push or not to push, among the things a good push bot would consider were

- What winning the blinds is worth to them.
- How often they are going to get called by the opponents still to act.
- When they are called, what hands their opponent is likely to have.
- How often they are going to be able to beat those hands.
- What winning that all-in coup will be worth to them.
- What consequences will losing that all-in coup have for them.


You can think about these things at the table, and use our intuition, common sense and experience or (latent mathematical subconcious prowess even) to try to come to the best descion.

Away from the table though, it's always good to be able to quantify things, put some actual numbers onto some of our factors to help us make a more informed judgement. This is where some poker calculators came along, a pariticularly fine one still going strong today is called Pokerstove.



Pokerstove.

Available to download (for free!) from http://www.pokerstove.com/download/

Here I have entered two hands to see how my 9s 6s fairs against the mighty Ac Kd when we're both all-in pre flop. I know I'm in bad shape, but I want to know how often I can expect to win the pot.
 
Very simple to do, anyone who has been apprenhensive about using poker software I would encourage to have a play about with a Pokerstove as they don't come simpler.

To replicate this experiment, after downloading and installing the latest version of Pokerstove, just click on the "Player 1" box, click on your two cards from the list of 52 and click 'OK'.

Then we click on the "Player 2" box and enter the two cards you want to run your cards against. After clicking OK again, press the big 'Evaluate' and then you'll get to where we are in this picture.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/pstove01.jpg)

It has swiftly run through all the 1,712,304 possible combinations that five cards can be dealt from the remaining 48 cards (in 0.002 seconds) and calculates the equity that each hand has. Here we see my 96s has a win% of just under 40%, so we're going to bink about 4 times in 10. (As an aside, that's about the same frequency that a good player can expect a top 3 finish in a single table tournament)

Our chip equity it lists as 39.825% of the pot. We don't want to confuse this with the win% figure. The reason for the difference between the two is the occasional split pot.
 
We'd multiply our chip equity % figure, 39.825, by the size of the pot and divide by 100 to get our equity in terms of the number of chips we can expect to average.
Note : We don't want to confuse this chip equity with the equity we get from using the ICM model, so we'll call it cEV. (chip expected value)

All very nice and pretty, but in practise, we're never going to be in a situation where we know that if our opponent calls us, he has the exact hand Ac Kd.


Range Rovers

What we might have though, is a good idea of the range of cards our opponent might call us with. This idea of a "putting someone on a range" is central to the application of the ICM in sitngos.

As an example of a range, we might feel we'll get looked up by 77+ (which is shorthand for pocket 8's and all bigger pairs), A9s+, AJo+, KTs+, KQo+, QTs+ (which is the hands A9s, ATs, AJs, AQs, AKs, AJo, AQo, AKo... you get the idea)

This is an easy peasy job for Pokerstove to evaluate too. We click on 'Player 2', then 'Clear', then the 'Preflop' bar at the top. We can then select all the possible hands we think he'll call us with. (or in this case, slide the bar at the to 10.3%, meaning he'll call us with the top 10.3% of hands according to some hand ranking system, more on this later)

After we click 'OK' and 'Evaluate' we now get the following screen.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/pstove02.jpg)

This time it's looked at over 226 million hands (in a quarter of a second!)
All the possibilities of the hands, and the resultant figures it spits out at us will be a weighted average* of how we will fare with our bold 96s against this range of hands.

*There are more ways to make AQo than there are to make AA. Pokeystove knows this. It also knows that it can't use Aspades 9s (ducy? :) )

So, we can now see that 96s isn't quite so hot as before. When called by this range, we're only going to win just over 3 times in 10.



I'm breaking this post up into two parts now to make it a little more manageable. We continue below by going back to look at the main factors a push bot will have to consider when making his decision, and see how we're getting on attaching some good solid numbers to as many of them as we can.

Brilliant stuff Tank.

tank im not in a good enough state to remember it if i read it now but it looks damn impressive.

Look forward to it.

Probably best to wait a few days.

I'm really not happy with the second bit, especially the last part. It was rushed because it was getting late and I wanted to get something down. There's an important part that I want to fit in, and probably not so important parts that could be left out. It wants proof read and neatened up. (and probably broken up into two seperate posts, gg 3 part series, you're now a 5 part series.)

Back to our factors.

I'll just copy and paste them here, and see how we're getting on quantifying them.

- What winning the blinds is worth to them. We'd need to guesstimate our equity with our new stack size after we've chomped the blinds.
- How often they are going to get called by the opponents still to act.  We can use our experience, observation and knowledge of opponent to get this down.
- When they are called, what hands their opponent is likely to have. As above, we can have a good stab at this, hand rankings, like the 'top 10.3%' we just put into Pokerstove are quite helpful. So much so that the convention now is to think about what hands the opponent will call with, and that answers the previous question at same time
- How often they are going to be able to beat those hands. We've done that, Pokerstove, piece of piss.
- What winning that all-in coup will be worth to them. Needing to make a guesstimate at what our equity would be.
- What consequences will losing that all-in coup have for them. Again, another equity guesstimate required. Unless we were the shorter stack, in which case it's pretty easy to calculate our equity exactly. (ducy)



So the numbers helped a little. Intuition and judgement was still required because too many of these numbers were guesstimates. There were plenty of successful pushbots going about so it wasn't like we were a million miles away from what is now thought of as optimal strategy. It was tough to be sure if something was right or not though, too many things above highlighted in red that could not be reliably quantified.

The figures in red all had something in common though, they all had to do with equity. The sitngo boffins who worked hard to drive this strategy forward worked hard to find a reliable way of calculating your equity at a given point in a tournament as they knew that then everything would slot into place. There would only be one variable in the picture, how often your opponent called you.


The Hunt for Red October

[ x ] artistic licence heavily employed in the following section

Attempts were made to put figures on tournament equity based on empirical observations of many tournaments played (although somewhat less rigorously completed than the 5 million billion squillion trials of the previous post) It was a noble attempt, and probably better than picking numbers for your equity at a given point out of thin air (which was also tried in hand analysis, quite a lot)

It was too hard though, it was too big a job. They knew other players stack sizes had such a huge influence on things, and so to measure equity empirically they'd need to do all sorts different trials for all sorts of different stack size scenarios. It was hard enough to do one. A lot of them just forgot about it, used whatever made up numbers for equity they liked the best and continued their analysis. (They didn't do too badly)

When ICM was developed, the mathmatical model to estimate equity (and estimate it quite well) based on purely quantifiable factors, it was to sitngo strategy what the industrial revolution was to erm... industry I guess.



The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Now that they could put good numbers on all the main factors invloved in this push fold desicion. It wasn't long before people made a program that combined the work of Pokerstove with an program that used the ICM mathematical model to calculate equitys, bosch it all together, and after inputing a likely range for your opponent calling, come out with a single and simple instruction... push or fold.

One of the first (possibly the first?) program of this type (that we now call ICM calculators) was Sitngo Power Tools. It had a bit of a dark history as I recall, it's inital function was to run the calculator in game, so the push bot really would be a push bot. The poker sites didn't like this idea (and quite rightly too!) so made it difficult for sitngo power tools.

It was soon discovered though, that this ability to run the calculator 'in game' wasn't really necessary. If you looked at enough scenarios, you soon developed a feel for what was right and what wrong "according to ICM" and could employ the strategies it recommended without the need to run dodgy software at the same time as you were playing.

This was all around about the 2005/2006 sort of time. ICM was gradually being adopted by pushbots everywhere. The reason was simple, it worked! People who used it had more success than people who didn't.

Not only were they achieving higher ROIs, but the simplification of the (already quite simple) desicion making process meant that people were finding it possible to play more and more tables simulataneously. In 2006 players like The_Ventian on Pokerstars were considered amazingly gifted to play 10 turbo STT tables at a time. When Elky achieved Supernova status in a month it was headline news around the poker world and the man. Today, I would expect anyone to be capable of playing 10 tables, and if someone wanted to make a prop bet that they could get Supernova in a two weeks, they'd be lucky to find any action whatsoever.

Gifted players are now playing 20 tables profitably, and your concert pianist standard guys can manage to hold down 40. 

Through a Darwinian-like evolutionary process, we now find ourselves in a situation where I think it's safe to say that studying ICM is a categorical imperative for anyone serious about playing online sitngos as a way of making money.



Fuddy duddies.

The reason I'm taking the time to write this for the fuddy duddies is that I was a fuddy duddie too!
It wasn't until 2008 that I finally accepted that there might be something to this ICM lark and it was worth my while having a look.

I'd like to kid myself that what turned me off it so long was the early attempts at an 'in game' ICM calculator and me finding the very notion of such a thing morally repugnant. The truth is though, I was just arrogant and myopic. I remeber insisting that "the only sitngo power tool I need is between my shoulders."

I guess it's kind of typical of poker players, once they're making money they assume they're doing everything right and don't entertain the notion that they could make much more if they invested some time in looking into the latest strategy developments and working on their game.

I was happily plugging away and grinding some coin on the Tribeca network's sitngos in late 2006 and 2007. It wasn't until the network disbanded and I moved back to Pokerstars that it hit my how much the game had evolved in such a short space of time. The year prior I was able to beat the games comfortably. I was making loads of mistakes, but the games were forgiving and I kept up a healthy ROI. With the same game the following year, I suddenly went from being a 'decent reg' to a 'rakeback pro'
Life factors came along and I decided gg professional poker career, I'll try my luck in the real world.

I made a comeback to online poker in mid 2008, but first armed myself with a good working knowledge ICM, that I try and keep up. I'm doing ok, nothing spectacular but it's steady-ish money by professional gambler standings, I'm yet to have a losing month since returning to the cyber-felt. :)



That took me a little longer than I thought it would.

It's a difficult concept to try and sell this ICM buisness. It's now 1am and I've covered half of what I wanted to in the second post. (I thought I'd be done all 3 by about 9pm)
I think it's important though, to understand where ICM came from, it will help us properly apply it.

I need to go back and edit bits, tidy it up, come up with a simile that isn't as kak as that industrial revolution one, but I can do that another day.



Coming soon-ish

Still to come, the limits of ICM, the problems of ICM, and how I recommend you go about learning how to use it yourself (sitngowiz tutorial!)

I'm away on the train tomorrow morning and might get some done then. In all likelyhood it will be tomorrow night before I'm done though.

I will say this at the moment, for all I rave about Wiz, I don't recommend anyone actually buys the thing. It's easy to use, very pretty and 30 day free trials are nice things, but $100 is too pricey for something that essentially just does the job of an ICM calculator. (That I believe can be picked up for free)
I do not rate most of the bells and whistles it comes with to justify the pricetag. More on that when we continue...

See, I don't understand why the player 1 hand, (6s 9s) has an equity of 60.175%, while the player 2 hand, (Ac Kd) has an equity of 39.825%. (Highlighted below)


Yours
F Duddy.


(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/pstove01.jpg)

Exceptional thread

RED, it decides to list them in a funny order at the bottom to confuse you

To the right of the panel at the bottom {in the curly brackets} you'll see which equity figure corresponds with which hand. The 96s is 40% and the AKo is 60%.

They seem to be in the correct order at the bottom, and the wrong order at the top though.

Am I making a fool of myself here? (I don't mind if I am, I'm used to it)

Wonderful thread tank

We need to see more of this type of stuff on here.

Think you might need to upgrade as mine has the figures the right way round next to the hands.

tank's has done the same if you look at his ss on page 1. very odd that they've both got the same thing as it's definitely wrong, I've never seen stove do that in years of using it

Meh I would disagree with this I think it is well worth the $100 and you be hard pressed to find better value for money for improving your poker game. Just having it for a month on free trial will no doubt massively help your game. I still use it just about every day, constantly reinforcing what I know as well as adjusting my ranges in certain spots.

Other than that, this is best attempt I have seen at explaining ICM in laymans terms. It is a very hard subject to explain.

Nice job.  Wiz is a must have.  However much you can get by with freeware alternatives, $100 is going to be such a piffling expense at the end of a SNG year that it isn't worth trying to evade.

It is a hard subject to deal with from first principles, the only other example I would offer is the old chestnut of 'doubling up first hand doesn't double your tourny equity - so don't go out of your way to flip' and possibly leading into tracing the benefactors of that lost tourny equity.

People moan about SNGs getting much harder, but I still routinely see A4 - v - 66 getting it all in first orbit.

Exceptional stuff Tanky - most selfless of you.

Thank you.

Right.

Say I play a few SNG's, and there are four or five hands that I'm wondering if I could have played better, How do I find those hand-histories and get them into Wiz for analysis?

The easiset thing to do for individual hands is get them from the instant hand history on stars and copy them to a notepad document.

Then cut and paste them into sngwiz, on the main page there is a paste hand history icon and then that hand will appear with stack size in the standard sngwiz format.

I normailly just go through whole tournament and that is done different by the open a tournament folder and searching for that tourney on your hard drive.

How do you know which tourney is which?

My tournament histories get divided up by date in my hard drive as they are stored in Holdem manager archive. So I just go to that file and import all my tournaments for that day and work through them.

If I want to find a specific tourney I will just the tourney id no and locate it. When I have imported all that day tourneys.

Yes. Just managed to suss that.

Some of the hands have a "x" prefix (The ones where I did it wrong) Some have a tick, and some have neither. Why neither?


Also, say I pushed and it tells me I should have folded, does it tell me why?

The ones with no symbol, usually means you had more than 10bbs in your stack. So therefore going all in and folding aren't you are only options.

If you look at those hands it will have a warning that there are better options available but it will still do the mathematical analysis for you.

Yes the maths is all there on the screen it will give you 3 figures eqP% (equity of pushing %) eqf%( equity fold %) and the diff% (which is the difference) between the 2.

The diff % is the big one if it is positive going all in is the correct play and if it is negative folding is the best play.

Tank no doubt will explain this better in due course.

in SNGWiz Tools>Options>General>Handfilter>Show qualified games    and that will tidy up the "neither"

On Stars, Lobby>Options>Instant HH Options   will show you where your HHs are being stored (assuming you have ticked the 'save my HHs check box)

On FTP, it is Lobby>Options>HHs

You can then inform Wiz to go and scrape those HH folders for you.  Or if you aren't playing many games, as Longy says you can copy the text HH real-time onto notepad (if you have a tough decision in-game for example and want to review it) and load it directly into Wiz.

That's better, thanks.

When I review a hand, can I see what his cards were if there was a showdown?

Go to the edit hand history icon at the top (looks like a notepad) then you can see the raw hh with hands at showdown.

Excellent. can I then edit that player's notes, and if I do, will it create - update the notes on pokerstars?

Can't copy HH into wiz. When I click the icon, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

Hmmm pass, you have copied an individual hand and then clicked the paste icon, right?

Save the HH as a notepad file and upload the file into Wiz.

Or alternatively, use the HH as a reference and build the hand from scratch in Wiz, this is a good exercise to do as it opens up Wiz as a modelling tool ~ where you can answer the 'what if' questions.  e.g. would it still be a shove if the chip distribution was a  little more skewed?  Would it still be a shove if the micro stack had shoved first? etc.

Correct.

You can also get it included for $175 with a 12 month subscription to sttgrinders, for their full access package...

Sure am good at estimating how long things take.

Going to do some more work on this tomorrow, with the Wiz side of things.

The following is an explanation as to how I use sitngo Wiz. If you need help setting the software up, you're having technical issues or have any questions of that sort like how to automatically import hands*, Sitngo Wiz has tutorial videos, FAQs and a support forum that will be of more use to you than I will be.

*I don't use Wiz like that, but more on that another day.

Sitngo Wiz Tutorial.

SitNGo Wizard home page
http://sngwiz.com/index.php

You might have heard people recommend, when asked about the best methods to learn how to use ICM in your sitngo strategy, "put hands into Wiz and play about with them"
This tutorial looks to touch on the subject of what that actually means.

I'm going to try and explain briefly about entering a tournament structure, manually entering a hand into sitngo Wiz, then we're going to look at the 'playing around' bit. In particular how to interpret the charts that Wiz can generate. These graphs are, in my opinion, the most powerful feature of the program, understand how to use them and you're well on your way to getting the most out of Wiz.


Tournament payout structure.

Obviously what the payout structure is in a particular tournament will have a impact on what to do in a given situation, and the ICM math that Wiz will calculate for you. First things first then is to tell Wiz which kind of tournament (and the payout structure) that is going to be relevant for us.

Wiz has a few of these preloaded, but if it doesn't have the one you want (particularly if it's a MTT SNG) we'll have to put it in ourselves. (We only have to do this once obv, it will save it for us)

From the main screen, at the top, go to
Tools > User defined tournament structures

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut01.jpg)

This screen will come up. We want to click on the top left hand side where it says add structure.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut03.jpg)

Under description, write whatever you want so that you recognize this structure in future.
Under copy from, pick another comp that Wiz already has preloaded. This way you won't have to manually plug in the blind structure.

Now we've done that we're back to this screen with three tabs. 'General', 'Blinds' and 'Payouts'


In the General tab we want to tell Wiz the total number of chips in the tournament, and the number of players.
We can't change the number of players to more than 10. Don't worry, this is just the number of players at any one table, you don't need to set it to 45 or 180 or whatever.
It is a little crazy though, as it's just set up for single table tournaments. What you want to do is divide the total number of chips in play by whatever you've put for PlayerCount and put that as the ChipCount, a little like I've done here...

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut02.jpg)

Wiz now thinks it's a single table tournament where everyone starts with 7,500 chips. It suits our purposes where we'll be looking for Wiz to perform ICM based calculations on final table scenarios.

In the blinds tab we shouldn't have to do much as we've already copied them from another game on the same site.
If for some reason Wiz has missed a level out that you need to study, you can't insert it in place, but it won't mess things up if you just put it in at the end like I've done here...

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut04.jpg)

In the payouts tab, the most important to get right, enter the % of the prize pool that is awarded to each place.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut05.jpg)

If you don't know how to convert the actual prize people get into percentages, just post on here and someone will help you I'm sure. (If not I will)
I'm not going to go into how to do that at the moment; it would be a bit of a tangent.
Do make sure you get this part right in the payouts tab correct though, it will make a difference to the ICM math that Wiz runs.

Now we are ready to enter a hand. Press ok to go save what we have done. If we want to go back at any time and make a change, maybe to enter a new blind level, just go into Tools > User defined tournament structures again and select the one you want to edit from the left hand side.

You sir are putting so much work into this.  ;tightend; ;tightend;

Manually entering a hand.

When I am playing sitngos and a hand comes up that I might want to review later, I'll copy and paste it into a notepad file so I can run it through Wiz later.

Other times I'll be on a hand analysis forum and want to enter a hand into Wiz that someone else has posted.

There is a way to copy and paste hands directly into Wiz, but I don't use it so I'm not going to tell you about it. Currently (as far as I'm aware) it doesn't support the hand historys converted by Holdem Manager (but the Wiz people are looking to change that soon.)


The example hand.

I'm going to look at a hand I played on Tuesday in a $69+$6 45 man sitngo on FullTilt.
It's from the 800/1600 blind level and the play is 3 handed.


Quick tangent : We're already nicely in the money, we've just got to sort out who gets the bux and who gets the mad bux. The thing is we can't afford to lie back and think 'toasty life, we've cashed.'
The gaps between payouts here is much bigger than the gap on the bubble. Your play in these shorthanded spots is really important to your long term profitability in sitngos.

Full Tilt Poker Game #18720797745: $69 + $6 Sit & Go (142063269), Table 2 - 800/1600 - No Limit Hold'em - 22:47:03 ET - 2010/02/23
Seat 2: HERO (42,767)
Seat 6: VILLAIN (6,298)
Seat 8: jrock420j (18,435)
HERO posts the small blind of 800
VILLAIN posts the big blind of 1,600
The button is in seat #8
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to HERO [ Jc 8h ]
jrock420j folds

Most of you will recognize that this is a pretty straightforward hand. We shove.
The thing is, we think we know VILLAIN quite well, and that he is going to call us with any two cards here. We're going to put it into Wiz to check that it's still a shove.

We might also want to consider what to do with different hands in this spot, or what to do if the stack sizes are different. We're going to put it into Wiz and have a play


Putting it into Wiz.


First of all, right at the top of the main menu, select the option 'Analyze
a new game' (What we're really doing is analyzing one hand from a game)

Select from the drop down menus the tournament structure we want.
Also we want to put in the blind level we're at when this hand takes place.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut06.jpg)

Now we have to enter the stack sizes. Wiz always wants whoevers UTG first (when we're 3 handed the button is also UTG) and then we go round to the left.
In this case the small blind (HERO...yay) will be UTG+1 and the big blind (VILLAIN...boo) will be the UTG+2.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut07.jpg)

A few tips when entering stack sizes...

1. When you're reading the hand history. Whoever is listed below the big blind is the UTG player.
Start from there and work your way downwards till you get to the last player on the list, then start at the top of the list and work your way downwards till you've got everyone.

2. To save time when entering stack sizes, we want to avoid continually moving our hands between mouse and keyboard. After we've entered the first stack size, keep your hands on the keyboard and just press the tab key 4 times for the cursor to get to the place where you enter the next players stack.

3. Wiz knows the total amount of chips that are in play, so the last players stack will be entered for us. Checking that this matches up is a good way to double check that we've entered all our stack sizes correctly.


Hole

Now we want to tell Wiz our holecards, in the column cards next to every player there will be the word 'Pick'
Click on the one that corresponds to our stack size and the following screen comes up

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut08.jpg)

Here we select from the possible 169 starting hands in holdem which one we have. J8o we want today so we click on that.

Now it will automatically change all the players who were to act before us as having folded. We can change their actions by clicking on them if we wish, and we may well look at that later. As it stands though, the only player acting before us was jrock420j and he did fold and so we're done.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/wiztut09.jpg)

Click the ok button at the bottom, and we're ready to start looking at the hand.



{the next of wiz tutorial to follow when it's ready...}

My list of things to do

1. Do part 2 of the first Wiz tutorial (which I think is part 3 of the whole thing)
2. Revise and update part 2 of part 2.
3. Talk about minimum edge (I don't like it much)
4. Talk about using Wiz to automatically go through your tournaments and flagging hands (not a big fan of this either)
5. more stoof I cannae mind the now
6. Go through and nit at it all from start to end correcting minor errors etc. Then when it's cooked break it all into similarly sized chunks and make a new thread where it's all there nice and neat and complete and easy to read.

Timescale - not going to tell fibs, when I can. Hopefully I'm at the '5. more stoof I cannae mind the now' stage by this time next week.


If people have feedback or questions in the meantime fire away.

Top job indeed.  :)up

Changed my mind on telling people not to buy Wiz. It's still the daddy.

There's bits of it I don't think people need that much, but there's still bit's that I forgot about that people do need that free ICM calculators won't offer.

Will get round to talking about that soon.

Bump?

Tank, do you have any idea if you are going to have the time to finish this mate?

Fair bump, yes I really should have finished this, left it at about 60%.

Will have a look in a few weeks. (Busy now)

wakey wakey tank.
Good stuff and ive enjoyed it so far.
Think I need to play with wiz tomorrow and get my learn on again.

Are you still planning to complete thi Tank?

Why does ICM only matter for sit n go's can it not be used for MTT's as well in the late stages?

Yes, sigh

If it's not urgent, it doesn't get done these days. I need to set aside a couple of mornings when I'm free to pick it back up and finish it off. Brain too frizzed in the evenings to concentrate.

I know what I want to say, and I'll feel good when it's done I suppose.

ICM is relevant in any tournament where it isn't winner takes all.

Good I am trying to understand ICM but it is frying my brain, according to sit n go wizard I seem to be a nit and I don't want to be a nit (not sure how good the hand ranges I am putting in are though). I should have stuck to playing cash games I can do those *lol*

So in a deep stack event where the play is quite good but generally too tight (APAT for example) if I have say 13 big blinds ICM seem to suggest I should shove very wide from the cut off if folded to me. Why is it not better to raise to say 2.5xBB and fold to a reraise. They are very unlikely to be making a move in most cases, is it because of the percentage of my stack that is in, this does not seem to be too much and I seem to have enough to fold.

I sure don't shove on people who do this with 73os and they fold 95% of time at least.So the answer is it's massively exploitable.

But most people don't, they probably should be but they don't.

Am I over thinking this and trying to make it more complex than it is. What stack size would you be open shoving with? 13BB seem too big to be open shoving even from late position. Also I assume I should be trying to exploit the other players who do this a lot.

13BB with antes on a full table is going to be equivalent to about 8BB without antes (assuming the ante is approx 1/10 of a BB which is true of apat structure)

if your cutoff point without antes is 10xBB that's going to be about 16BB with antes so we can start shoving much sooner

Another newcomer to this post, great so far thanks!