[citanul]

leap,

you're simply entirely wrong (when you say that maybe if we reduced things to "concepts" we wouldn't have to do tons of analysis), and i'll offer a very quick, somewhat hand-waving argument/example of why.

late game play in stts is by and large a math problem.

each time you make a play, you ask yourself:

"is the value of the chips that i expect to have when i follow through with this play greater than the value of the chips that i could expect to have from any other alternative?"

in many situations where you must ask yourself whether or not to move all in, for example. when you look at this, you look at

Expected value of the stack if we fold,

and

Expected value of our stack if we move all in

assuming we are covered, this is:

(probability that everyone folds)(value of stack if they all fold)+
(probability of getting called)(probability of winning if called)(expected value of the stack we are left with if we are called and win)

when we look at the example in this thread, the most important thing to consider is that by leaving ourselves the chance to fold if we need to, we have preserved the value trapped in those remaining chips in situations where we would most like to have them.

anyway, back to my main example:

pretty obviously, even if we can perfectly estimate how our opponents call (and that is not a simple task), knowing both the probability of winning if called by a range, and the expected value of our stack when we fold, and the expected value of the stack we get by stealing the blinds, the expected value of the stack we get by doubling up, etc, are all things that really, you can't know unless you've done your homework.

if one were to try to make a very simplified example of a sng hand, it would look like the standard Chubukov-Sklansky question. Certainly it isn't easilly suggested that by understanding a "concept" one would be able to come up with the Chubukov-Sklansky numbers, or even a reasonable approximation, if one needed them on the fly while playing poker at a table. again, the C-S numbers are about the most simplified you can make a stt late-game question.

to be more precise for your understanding, there are plenty of situations one could quickly draw up where it would be correct to move all in with K9o but not K8o, or K9s but not K9o. This is not the sort of thing that a "concept" would help with. shortly, late game stt play is almost entirely "brute force mathematics."

i hope that clarifies a bit.

citanul