I have been playing a lot of ultra-turbo SNGs in the periods where I am not able to commit the time or energy to a tournament. After playing a few and referring to the cEV NES sheets that Tony has created and it got me thinking about the adjustments I should be making when considering the bubble in a SNG.



I really enjoy playing the 6 max games and I thought that these would be the best place to play and focus on NES play because for every win we are getting back the 70% of the pool.


Now I thought that it would be worth having NES sheets for the bubble

play. So similar to how Tony set up his sheets I gave everyone equal stacks but instead of making the pay out one, I made it .7/.3 the value of the prize pool for first and second. Now I did this for stacks sizes 1-20 and I came up with some interesting results when I compared them to the cEV sheets.
  • 1. The button shove range was 8% tighter on average
  • 2. The SB shove range was near 10% wider
The first thing that came to mind was that the button shove range is narrow because we are not taking into account future hands (also likely the reason for the SB range being wider). Since in a 6 max game we will be in the blind the next hand I think that it’s important to try and quantify the importance of collecting the blinds with a button shove. Because we will be posting the big blind we will likely be in a position where we need to call all in correctly. So I thought that it would be important to quantify how valuable it is to have an extra 1.5bbs in order to avoid having to commit ourselves next hand. Also we have the added benefit of more chips which gives us more double up equity.


First we will assign the variables.
  • [FONT=Symbol]· [/FONT]B (value button will shove)
  • [FONT=Symbol]· [/FONT]S (value SB will shove)
  • [FONT=Symbol]· [/FONT]x (value we will call Button shove with)
  • [FONT=Symbol]· [/FONT]y (value we will call SB shove with)
  • [FONT=Symbol]· [/FONT]Z (value SB will call button shove with)
Next the formula that I see us call all in is
Call% = (B*x)+ [(1-B)*S*y] - (B*Z) I think this is right but obviously correct me if I am wrong. (B*x) represents us calling the button shove. [(1-b)*S*y] is when it’s folded to SB and he shoves and we call. (B*Z) is when the button shoves and the SB calls (we will fold all but a small percent of hands which I am not going to correct for).


Yes my brain is sore as well. Now I take my 5BB shove range and insert the values from the nash calculator into the formula and I am left with a call% of 24.79%


So knowing that we are going to be all in next hand 24.79% how often will we be all in if the effective stack size is 6.5bbs instead of 5bbs. If we take the values form the nash calculator and plug them into the formula then we are left with a call% of 19.52%.


AND NOW I AM LOOSING SLEEP. The difference between folding the button and getting a steal through is huge on how I play my BB next hand. But with this value I am not sure how I should be adjusting my range on the button. Since I will be calling 20% less all in next time I think that I could be adjusting my shoving range on the button by this amount. For example the 5BB shove on the button is 30.6% if we add 20% then we will be shoving 36% and adding 6% of hands which I am assuming since they are not part of the original nash calculation “exploitable”.


Any thoughts on how this could translate into how I should adjust my range. I do feel like I am moving in the right direction but not being familiar with SNGs I feel like I might be leaking out equity.