PokerWorld

You cannot buy a car with tournament chips!

This week I promised to tell you one of those “secrets” that really made me step up my game and improve my win rate a lot in Sit and Go tournaments. If you do not know how these tournaments are working, please take a look at the “First steps to poker” - section here at Pokerworld.

One late evening a few years back I was discussing poker with a very successful poker professional that played Sit n Go’s only. I told him he had to teach me how to win those. “It is easy”, he said, “you just need to know the GAP concept and some basic ICM”. Right, that did sound easy, didn’t it? Or do you just hate those shortenings that do not say anything? I know I do! This week I am going to talk more about “ICM”. I will follow up with the GAP concept in a later article. This topic is a very advanced one with more boring mathematics than you would see in school over several years, but I am certain that a basic understanding that I hope to give you in this article will be enough to improve your game a lot.

“ICM” stands for “Independent Chip Model” and is a way of calculating your expected value in the tournament in terms of real cash value. When playing poker in a cash game it is easy to see how much money you have at the table and compare that to what you have in actual money (easy in theory that is, does not those small chips seems a lot less worth than the real bills?). If you are sitting with $52 in front of you, you have $52 in money and can go and buy a nice T-bone steak at the restaurant when you have cashed them out.

When you start a Sit n Go you usually have $1500 in front of you, but hey, do not run away and buy a new computer just yet. That money is pretty useless unless you manage to end up in the payout structure. When you are “in the money” however, it does not matter if you end at third place with $1 in tournament chips or if you had $5000 before the hand. If you end third you will receive the same amount of money in any case. What I want to show with this example is that it is not easy to know how much money you have in terms of real cash when playing a Sit n go.

This is what “ICM” calculates for you. It uses your current chip count to calculate your chances of winning the tournament, something that you can use to determine how much “real cash” you have at the moment. What you will find out is that even if you double your stack and bust a player early in the tournament your chances of winning the tournament have not doubled. Instead the chance of getting money in the tournament has increased for all players at the table. You still have the biggest chance to win it, but all other players at the table improved their chances as well. This means that you need more than a coinflip (a hand where you have approximately 50% chance of winning, like QQ against AK or JT against 88) in order to compensate for the increased equity you give to the other participants in the tournament.

This effect increases even more as players are getting knocked out. When we are close to the bubble the cost for making a “bad” call is increasing even more. Before deciding your move you need to look around at the table considering all players stacks and their chance of getting busted from the tournament. The example that really opened my eyes is the following.

You are sitting at the big blind with $4000 in chips and there are 4 players left with 3 prices. Blinds are $200/400. UTG and the button both have $1000 in chips and the small blind has $4000 as well. If the small blind goes all-in (the other 2 have folded) you cannot really call with many more hands than AA and KK. Not even a solid hand like AK can be profitable to call with, your opponent can actually go all-in with all his hands, and you could still not call even if you knew he was going to push all hands.

Against a random hand AK wins approximately 2/3 of the time. The chance that one of your opponents with $1000 in chips is busting out is bigger than that, hence you should fold.

This example really opened my eyes on how to think, and combined with the GAP concept it totally changed my way of playing tournaments. Until next week, good luck at the tables!

Best regards

Per “Illvillja” Wolf

PokerWorld Pro

 

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