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Message: [QUOTE="Dara OKearney, post: 5166041, member: 390655"] Thank you for the welcome! I'm glad your study partner is enjoying the book, and hope you will too. You've nailed it in terms of the biggest mistakes people make (which therefore generates the biggest edges for those of us who don't make them): it's all around ICM in the closing stages. The biggest errors are definitely calling errors, in spots where a player unnecessarily puts themselves at risk by calling an all in with a premium where there's very little upside to doubling up in chips but huge downside. Concrete example: it's the bubble and you're in the big blind, 95% sure of a seat. The small blind covers you and shoves. You think he's abusing the bubble shoving any two. You look down at aces and call. This is a huge mistake. If you win you move from 95% to (almost) 100% certain of a seat, but if you lose you move from 95% all the way down to zero. So you need 95% equity to call, and aces only has 85%, so calling "costs" you 10% of a seat, which in a 1 in 10 satellite is an entire buyin. Now 85% of the time you'll win and think you made the right play, and even the 15% of the time you get unlucky you'll write it off as a bad beat, but in the long term this is a big losing play. You'll even see people call with KK (82% equity against any 2), QQ (80%), JJ (77%) or worst of all Ace king (66%) because "I know I'm ahead". Calling off ace king in this spot is a 3 buyin mistake roughly in a 1 in 10 gets a seat satellite. The biggest problem we have in this spot is if we are the small blind making the shove, which is theoretically correct because the big blind is supposed to fold everything, we don't benefit from his mistake when he calls. In fact our equity is severely hurt too, and everyone else in the tournament shares out the equity we and the big blind both lose. So there's a huge difference between what it's theoretically correct to shove, and what we should do in practise. This is such a big deal we devote a couple of chapters to it in the book. The examples above are extreme ones from the bubble, but people make all sorts of similar mistakes near the bubble. In the book, we explain some "gorilla maths" methods you can use at the table to avoid these mistakes. Thank you for your very interesting question! [/QUOTE]

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