What in the WORLD is ICM???

[USCSigma1097]

What in the world is ICM...?

Please all veteran posters flame away...I can't find it in the archives...

Sigma

[pergesu]

http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/...;o=&fpart=

[eastbay]

That's not what ICM is. That's one way to apply it to certain kinds of decision making.

eastbay

[pergesu]

Okay...
ICM = independent chip modelling, which is a model used to meausre your equity in a tourney based on chip positions. It has its shortcomings, but it's useful to help make decisions on the bubble and ITM.

But I think the most important part of it is being able to apply it, thus the link above.

[johnnybeef]

I'm posting in hopes that someone corrects me if I am wrong, as this is a subject that I have just begun to grasp.

So here gos:

In a live game, all chips are equal to a certain amount of money which is a similar model to US currency and the gold standard (in fact for those of you who have never been to Vegas, most casino chips are as good as cash in many places). When you play a tournament, you receive an arbitrary amount of chips in exchange for your buy in. Unlike ring game chips, these chips (which will be from now on referred to as t) have no monetary value. One thing that should be noted is that in a cash game, the value of chips never changes (i.e. a $1 chip today will be worth $1 a year from today), where as in tournaments chip values change (i.e. t25 could be worth 1 big blind in round 1 of the tourney, but when the blinds are 10,000/20,000, t25 is a fart in the wind.) ICM is a way of assigning monetary value to these chips that is quite a useful tool when making decisions when the money is approaching in a tournament.

Before I explain how to assign these values, two values must be defined. These two values are money EV ($EV) and chip EV (CEV). Chip EV is the EV that is calculated in a ring game and is the EV that most people are familiar with. An example of chip EV would be when you have a nut flush draw on the turn and you are forced to call a bet of t100 in pot of t200 your CEV will be -t20 ( 2(300) + 8(-100) = -200....-200/10 = -20. For more info see small stakes holdem or theory of poker). $EV is a concept that is derived from two things that happen in tournaments: the first is that of chips changing values, and the second is from the fact that the payout structure in tournaments is top heavy (for instance it may be +$EV to make a play that is –CEV if in making that play you acquire a bigger stack that may enable you to win a tournament with relative ease).

The mathematics involved in ICM when there is more than one payout is quite advanced, so for a simple example of how ICM is calculated I will use an example of a winner take all tournament. Assume 4 players are remaining with t25 in a winner take all tournament that has a payout of $100. Let’s say that a player has a decision to either raise all in or fold. By raising all in, he would have a CEV of +5. ICM places a monetary value on this move of + $5 every time this move is made, as over time, this move will add $5 to this player’s wallet if it was made an infinite amount of times.

[maddog2030]

[ QUOTE ]
where as in tournaments chip values change (i.e. t25 could be worth 1 big blind in round 1 of the tourney, but when the blinds are 10,000/20,000, t25 is a fart in the wind.)

[/ QUOTE ]

It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the blinds, it has to do with the size of your stack and in relation to other stacks. If you have a 25 chip stack, those 25 chips are worth a lot more to you than someone who has a 25,000 chip stack in a normal tournament.