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How to Use the Automatic Hand Analysis in ICMIZER 3?
How to Use the Automatic Hand Analysis in ICMIZER 3?
Andrey Vasiliev avatar
Written by Andrey Vasiliev
Updated over a week ago

Automatic tournament analysis is one of ICMIZER 3’s key features. It is available with all ICMIZER subscriptions, including Basic and PRO. When you run automatic analysis, ICMIZER quickly processes all the hands you played in a tournament and identifies the ones worth analyzing. For each such hand, it calculates equilibrium ranges, evaluates your play, and pinpoints your costliest mistakes. This lets you quickly analyze whole tournaments to find the most controversial and challenging hands to learn from.

Which hands get analyzed by the automatic analysis feature?

The autoanalysis processes not all hands, but only those which match the specific criteria. Hands must be played at a push/fold stage of the tournament, or happen to be played as if they are in the push/fold stage already. Usually, such hands will involve a lot of folds and some short-stacked players.

The perfect hands for automatic analysis are those where players are limited only to push/fold decisions and have an effective stack equal to 20 big blinds or less. The effective stack is calculated as the second deepest stack among all players who did not openfold - fold as the first player’s action. If the player’s action in the distribution were not a push (or a push call) or a fold, it would not be autoanalyzed.

The goal of the autoanalysis function is to maximize the player’s benefit and minimize the possibility of misleading him. That is why the criteria for the analysis and the verdict about the wrongness or the correctness of the action are quite strict.

How to use the autoanalysis?

1. First of all, you need to open the ICMIZER tournament selector window.

2. Specify the mode (ICM% EV, ICM $ EV, Chip EV, Chip BB EV).

ICM %EV – results are displayed as a percentage of the tournament prize pool.

ICM $EV – results are displayed in dollars. When choosing this mode of calculation, for non-PKO tournaments it is necessary to input the prize pool of the tournament in the “Prize Pool” text box.

Chip EV – results are displayed in chips. Chip EV is a simplified calculating mode because when a player folds, his fold equity does not depend on the actions of his opponents and equals the remaining amount of chips in his stack. Choosing a Chip EV mode for any tournaments means that ICMIZER considers everything just in chips as if there are no payments in tournaments, and the game is essentially played in chips.

Chip BB EV – results are displayed in big blinds.

We recommend using ICM %EV or ICM $EV modes because Chip EV calculations produce inaccurate results in multi-table tournaments. It is not so relevant for large tournaments and a very early stage, but if there are less than 500 people at the start of the tournament or less than 500 people left, we highly recommend selecting the MTT Mode and ICM calculating. In that case, you get a much more accurate strategy than in Chip EV mode. Currently, in ICMIZER, you can calculate hands using ICM $EV or ICM %EV models when there are 500 players left in normal MTTs and 2,500 in PKO MTTs (with certain limitations)

3. Select from the list the structure of the tournament that you want to figure out using the autoanalysis.

When you are choosing a tournament there, it is essential to correctly select its payout structure and the existence of a bounty (regular tournaments, tournaments with bounties, and progressive bounties). The rest of the data ICMIZER takes from the loaded hand history file (blind levels, number of players at the table, etc.). Other types of data do not affect the calculation of the autoanalysis (such as the growth rate of blinds in the tournament – regular, turbo, hyper, or blinds growth step).

ICMIZER already has a preloaded list of the most popular tournament structures, but if this list does not have the necessary tournament, you need to create it yourself. To do this, click the “Create New” button and enter the required tournament data.

4. When you have selected the calculation type and structure of the tournament, close the tournament selector and load the tournament hand history file. Click “Auto-analyze hands”, then “Open file with histories” and select the hand history file for loading.

If the loaded tournament is MTT, then it is necessary to check the “MTT Mode checkbox and input the total number of chips in the tournament in the “Sum of ALL chips in MTT” text box, and the total number of registered players (for non-PKO tournaments).

If in the previous step the Chip EV mode was selected, then the MTT mode cannot be activated, because it works only with ICM calculations.

5. ICMIZER calculates how many hands the selected file contains. Click the “Load them” button.

The loading of hands to the server will begin, and analysis then. The whole complex and time-consuming analysis process perform in the ICMIZER cloud without overloading your computer. Even multi table tournaments with thousands of players, ICMIZER 3 revises in seconds with the new, improved engine.

During the autoanalysis, you can watch the hands in the “Analysis” column without waiting for the end of processing.

The “Histories” column contains all hands of the loaded tournament from the first to the last, the player’s cards, his position, and the number of players at the table. The column can be expanded by pressing the button:

The expanded form contains the size of the player’s stack in the big blinds, the size of the current blinds, and the possible action of the player.

You can select any hand from the list and calculate it yourself by clicking the ICMIZE button.

How to work with the results of the autoanalysis?

Autoanalyzed hands are displayed in the “Analysis” column and sorted by the size of the mistake – the more expensive mistake the player made, the higher position in the column this hand would have.

The following information is displayed in the “Analysis” tab:

Type – the action that the player made. There are four possible actions: P - push, C - call, O - overcall (when there was a push, a call, and the player made a call), R - open-raise, F - fold.

Loss – the amount won or lost by the player as a result of his action. The measure of the Loss depends on the selected calculation mode:

ICM %EV – results are displayed as a percentage of the tournament prize pool.

ICM $EV – results are displayed in dollars.

Chip EV – results are displayed in chips.

Chip BB EV – results are displayed in big blinds.

The color of Type and Loss shows how much the player’s action (push, call, overcall, or fold) corresponds to the positive action. Green means the player’s move was correct. Light green – the player’s action was reasonable. Yellow – the player made a minor mistake. The red color indicates that the player made a serious mistake.

Plrs – the number of players at the table.

Let’s analyze particular examples:

We can see that the player folded ATs, and so made a mistake that cost -0.75$. ICMIZER shows that here a Hero with a stack about 11 big blinds had to push facing a raise from an opponent on CO position. And, folded, he lost 0.75$.

In this hand, a player with 55 folded when two opponents before him already shoved. The Loss close to zero means that the player’s action was neutral, i.e., that was not a mistake, just as calling a push would not be a mistake too.

A Hero on the BTN with 99 pushed after limp from UTG. This action was correct, and he earned 0.95$.

The MTT autoanalysis

If you are analyzing MTT, you must use the MTT Mode. If this mode is not selected, ICMIZER calculates the hand as if the player is at the SNG table or the MTT final table.

We recommend using ICM $EV because you will see the results in dollars, which allows you to figure out the importance of the hand, and also quickly interpret the cost of your mistake as a percentage of ROI. To do this, open the ICMIZER tournament selector and select the ICM $EV mode. It is also necessary to input the prize pool of the tournament in the “Prize Pool” text box.

Select from the list the structure of the tournament that you want to figure out using the autoanalysis.

At the step of loading the tournament hand history file, it is needed to check the “MTT Mode” checkbox and input the total number of chips in the tournament in the “Sum of ALL chips in MTT” text box.

When the autoanalysis is completed, the MTT control panel will show up in the hands that were played before the final table.

There are several items in the MTT control panel, but one of the main ones is the “Remaining players”. If you place the cursor in this text box, a popup with an explanation will appear.

The MTT control panel also displays the generated player’s stacks at other tables, which will be used in the calculations.

How the generation of player’s stacks at other tables works:

1) If this is a regular MTT tournament, then after the player has input the total number of chips in the tournament, ICMIZER analyzes the average stack at the table and divides the total amount of chips into it. So we get the number of players in the tournament during the hand. If the sum of the chips at the table is equal to the total number of remaining chips in the tournament, then this is the final table. If not, then stacks are generated at other tables.

2) If this is a PKO (progressive knockout) tournament, then the balance of the bounty pool is additionally calculated using a complicated formula, i.e., how many bounties remained in the tournament’s bounty pool when the hand was played. Further, according to an advanced algorithm, ICMIZER generates stacks and assigns bounties to them under real bounty rules. As a result, ICMIZER generates bounty values that are incredibly close to the original bounties in the tournament.

If you somehow saved the information about the current stacks when the hand was played, then in the manual generation mode, you can easily and quickly input the stacks of the remaining players at other tables.

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