Hey, great question!

I think many people misplay ICM spots, even professionals and this is an area to take advantage of. When first seeing this problem, knowing you are prob 2/6 or 3/6, this looks like a snap fold.

"My friend says stick to icm however in my mind im thinking sacrifing $68 seems fine to accumulate on average 4.7bb when i only have 22bb. Is my thought process flawed?"

I would say yes, your thought process if flawed. This is an ICM spot and needs to be thought of in this sense, you cannot look at it from a chipEV perspective. The situation you are in as a "mid-stack" at a final table means you have to be very tight and busting before some of the short stacks would be a major punt without a premium hand. The big stack in this situation is allowed to take advantage and shove profitably a very wide range because all the mid to low stacks have to play very, very tight.

Based on my quick calculation, if the HJ with 120bb is shoving 23% and everyone else is between 12-23bb, you can only call the all-in with QQ-AA in this spot (not considering bounties).

You can make a lot of money by folding a lot in these spots and allowing other players to make ICM mistakes. It sucks but this is how you have to play as a mid-stack in ICM spots.

Also, you can bounties in on ICMizer so you may want to play around with this.

Hope my thoughts help.

I totally agree with Saul, I think there's a lot of people who makes these mistakes, and you can make a lot of money just be disciplined by fold correctly and let the others making ICM mistakes which is kind of difficult to find these edges, and easy to being biased for the fact that the CL is making a lot of money putting a lot of pressure and thinking thoughts like ''I'm not gonna let this guy making money over me'', but when you are making the correct decisions and let these exacly players who thinks this way make these mistakes, you are making a dead money which in the long run will make a huge impact in your ROI, based on the phrase of your friend I would say that he is almost certainly giving up of making more money in final tables, I think a professional has to always be thinking of making as much money as possible, and not just try to win the tournament, he will probably win the tournament a bit more, however he will leave a dead money for others the times that he bust earlier because of an ICM mistake, and consequently he will not be making as much money as possible, these are my thoughts for regular tournaments, for bounty tournaments, it seems reasonable to take a little more risk to get the first place but it is very easy to overestimate, so I'd be careful for making these adjustments, the best way to practice is probably running simulations on software to have more accurate answers, about the simulation that you'v ran, just make sure that you have estimated the range of the villain right, excluding the top of the range that he will not shove, just in case you didn't, other factor that the ICM doesn't take into consideration is that the time that you win the hand and you will get second in chips with a really bad situation in the sense that the villain is still going to be the big CL and that you will get very few good spots, I am not saying it is worse doubling of chips than do not doubling of chips, but for the possible ICM pressure you're under, it's not going to be as good doubling as it would be without this pressure, your position vs the villain also is relevant, when he is in your left is a lot worse. those are things to take into consideration. these are my thoughts, I hope I could help.

Hey thank you both for the response.I have been doing a bit of work but some of my findings feel very counter intuitive. For example, Salutynuts with your calc of only calling QQ+, im sure your right and i did fold AJo pretty quickly however i know i would really struggle folding AK JJ AQs here. ( even if someone had hard evidence in front of me saying it was -ev lol). It is also very tough when playing with unknowns to estimate how much they know about icm, and how to adjust accordingly.

I like playing a little looser than some in this spot. Given we have direct position on cl though, I probably stick it in w/ AK/JJ+. If we we didn't have position I'd probably open that to TT+ AQ+. The advantage we gain when we double is pretty significant, which is why I think people play too tight in these spots. You have the best seat at the table, so we can look for better spots.