Poker News

Players equity ICM calculator table for $20 turbo Sit & Go that pays 70 percent for 1st and 30 percent for 2nd.

On a thunder-stormy Thursday in July, I signed up for a low-limit hold?em game and looked around our local poker room. Fred beckoned me to his table, took a break, and asked me about the Independent Chip Model. He hoped the ICM would validate his decision to call two all-in players with his pocket aces. (See ?Aced Out,? Poker Player Vol. 11 No. 6 p.20.)

We first ran across elements of the ICM in Dick Mitchell?s article, ?Place and Show Betting,? on page 80 of the Gambling Times April 1985 issue, in which he elaborated on a portion of Ziemba and Hausch?s book, Beat the Racetrack. (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1984) Mitchell used Dr. Ziemba?s method to find place and show overlays: The same mathematics underlie the ICM.

Ziemba built on the fundamental assumption that the betting public assesses the horses? win probabilities accurately. Mitchell wrote, ?This assumption has been validated in many studies.? The ICM builds on the fundamental assumption that the players? win probabilities are directly proportional to their stack sizes. This assumption has been validated when all the players are of equal ability, or when luck dominates the results. Brown and Adams showed that tournament hold?em has a Gini coefficient of 0.24, which strongly suggests that luck dominates the results. (See ?Dreamin? of Gini,? Poker Player Vol. 11 No. 8.)

Fred cared not at all about ICM history or finding horse race betting overlays. He wanted to use the ICM to win poker tournaments. How does it work, he asked.

Suppose you entered a $20 turbo Sit & Go that pays 70 percent for 1st and 30 percent for 2nd. Suppose further that the stack sizes at level 3 were as shown. If you entered those stack sizes into an ICM calculator, then you would find the players? equities were those shown in the table. If the event were halted at that point, then those equities would be fair payouts according to the ICM.

ICM devotees use the following principle to fold or raise, often all-in: Pursue any actions that increase their equity; eschew any actions that decrease their equity.

They rarely call, I told him. If someone at your table never limps, frequently makes large raises and/or pushes all-in, then you should suspect him as an ICM devotee.

Fred asked how he could obtain an ICM calculator. There are three ways, I told him: use your web browser and find one on someone?s web site; build your own; download a shareware or even a freeware one. Nota bene I would not download an executable file except from a trusted source, instead I would use an ICM calculator running on someone else?s website, or one that I built myself. As a rule, I don?t download executable files. That just asks for trouble from worms, viruses, and Trojan horses.

You can run your ICM calculator in its own window alongside your virtual poker room window and see how the players? equities change every hand, I told Fred. If you have time, then you can use your ICM to decide whether to raise all-in or fold. That part interested Fred. He asked how he could use an ICM to tell him what he should do to win a poker tournament. The ICM is not a ?bot, I answered, that is a horse of a different color.

See Also:

ICM Part 2

ICM Part 3

ICM Part 4

ICM Part 5

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