[jcm4ccc]

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Quick question, for the ICM numbers did you just plug in whatever the stacks were on the 1st 4-handed hand?

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For the ICM numbers I plugged in for every 4-handed hand.

eastbay

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If I understand you correctly, you are plugging in data points for every 4-handed hand. So, for example, some tournaments might have 12 data points, and some might have only one. The data might look like this:

tourney stack icm actual
1111111 1500 $10 $15
1111112 1500 $10 $25
1111112 1500 $10 $25
1111112 1450 $9.5 $25

if that's true, I would say that this is a flaw in your research design. Your data points are not independent. They would be correlated with data points from the same tournament. Tournaments that lasted longer on the bubble would have more influence on your data than other tournaments.

This is a signficant problem, because there is probably a correlation between the size of the big stack and the length of the bubble. In other words, tournaments in which one stack has more than half the chips would have fewer hands on the bubble, and therefore have less influence on your data (fewer data points from those tournaments).

I would do as irieguy suggested. Use only the first hand in which you are four-handed. Alternatively, you could use the first four hands of a tourney (so that everybody gets the SB and BB once), average the results, and use that as your data point. Tournaments that lasted less than 4 hands would not be included in the data (though that adds a confounding factor--you would want to track how many tournaments are not included).