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ICM - Discussion/Questions Thread.
Sky_Dave
Member Posts: 3,288
ICM - Independent Chip Modelling. An essential bit of knowledge for those of you who want to grind out a living through sit and gos, and also very handy when in the latter stages of an MTT where you've got a decent understanding of how your opponents are playing.
But what do you know about Independent Chip Modelling? Many players are oblivious to it, some have a rough idea and I am sure some of the players on Sky Poker know what it is and apply it.
* Do you use ICM?
* Do you want to know what it is?
* Do you want to help others understand it?
Stick your posts and questions in here and hopefully it will help some of the STT and MTT players improve their game.
Comments
As I understand it when you are on (or close to) a money jump ICM means chips you win are less valuable than chips you lose, so calls that would be mathmaticly correct in a cash game can become incorrect in tournament situations. Short stacks should open their shoving ranges on money bubbles while big stacks should tighten up, particularly in pots against other big stacks. I'd like to get to grips with ICM as I think it's crucial to tournament end-games. I think any good tournament player is already instinctively using ICM to a certain extent even if they don't realise it, a better understanding of how it works and the maths involved can only be good thing.
The % of chips you have is the % chance of you winning the tournament. So in the early stages of a tournament a double up is a tiny increase in the % of chips you have of the total chips in play and therefore dictates avoiding risks and playing tight early on. In the latter stages it's the opposite.
this in practice may allow you to pass up on very small positive edges in the view that future edges will be on average larger due to your skill being greater, assuming you have greater skill than the average field
Edit: had this discusion on an other forum and the concensus was never to pass up on any +EV spots.
In a typical 6-max cash game, you’ll be used to the standard cEV chip equity function for making profitable decisions. A lot of the decisions you’ll make will be based on pot equity calculations, by using tools like Poker Stove. When deciding to make a value bet on the river with AQ on a missed draw for example, you’ll take into account your opponent’s likely range of hands and whether your equity in the pot is higher than his. In tournaments however, a different concept is required because of several key differences from MTTs to cash games.
Firstly, in multi-table tournaments, the value of each chip decreases as the game progresses and you get further into the money. This can be explained because of the unequal structure of tournament prize distributions. For example, in a $100 buy-in tournament you might start with 1,500 chips, which makes the value of each chip about $0.07. However, let’s imagine that there are 100 entrants in total, and after hours of play, we win the tournament with 150,000 chips and earn a $1,500 1st place prize. The value of each chip at the end is now $0.01, hence we can determine then that the value of each chip steadily decreases as the tournament progresses.
Your probably wondering what this all means right? Well, the reduction in the value of chips in MTTs is a crucial concept because it means that basic chip equity functions in tournaments won’t always mean +EV. The diminishing value of chips makes risking your own chip stack to gain extra chips less profitable than in a cash game. In other words, the reward of earning 100 extra chips in MTTs is lower than the risks of losing 100 – hence it doesn’t make sense to pull of risky moves where you’re marginal favourite at showdown.
Imagine for example, that we’re sat in a satellite tournament with 4 players left. The top 3 players will win a live package, and there is a small stack with less than 3xBBs who’s going to go our shortly. Now, if a deep stack player in MP shoves all-in and we have QQ on LP, it would obviously be +cEV to call him. However, in the wider picture, we should be folding this in the satellite because risking our entire tournment stack and live package is unnecessary. The short stack player will inevitably bust out soon and it would have been stupid to make a dangerous move that could end our tournament before him.
copy n paste ftw
oh yeah i get what your saying now lol, BUT once you get to the stage in a mtt or sng that icm becomes relevant you have got past the point were your skill advantage over weaker players has a strong factor over getting involved with marginal spots and it should be based more on stake sizes and your equity in the tourny, or am i missing the point of what you mean again?