Short Stacks In Tournaments, ICM, and Playing With the Antes
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If you haven’t been following the recent discussion about short stacks versus deep stacks in tournaments, please first read How Short Should You Go and How Short I Think You Should Go.
In the comments portion of the second article, a discussion of ICM was brought up. JJS said:
Ed are you considering that by the time you manage to build your $100 up to $500 and then up to $2000, the stack sizes of the other players will change. You won’t be facing uniform $10,000 stacks any more. Some players will also be short-stacked, and you won’t have any short stack advantage vs. them. Others will have huge stacks and might just call any raise you make hoping to draw out on you. I’m not sure what the overall effect of this is, but it must make things a little more difficult…
And Toonces replied:
Here is where we can apply the Independent Chip Model. If we have $2,000 in chips in a winner-take-all tournament, it makes [no] significant difference to our odds of winning if the other 5 stacks are at $10,000 or if 4 stacks are at $3,000 and one stack is at $38,000.
And then JJS replied:
Well, if we apply ICM then we get the result that I quoted in the other thread, namely, that buying in 100 times for $100 dollars gives you no real advantage over buying in 5 times for $2,000 (advantage is only 0.3% as I calculated there).
However Ed is claiming that the 100 buy-ins is a significant advantage over the 5 buy-ins. Therefore he must not be using ICM.
You can’t have it both ways. Either ICM applies, or it doesn’t.
It’s an interesting question. Does ICM apply, does it not, and what the heck is ICM anyway?
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Tags: antes, icm, independent chip model, no-limit-holdem, poker, poker-tournaments, short stack advantage, Short Stack Strategy
Great article Ed. I’ve always wondered if the basic assumption of the ICM was accurate. How accurate do people think it is for normal tournament situations? I suppose you could find pretty easily: just measure it. There’s plenty of tournament data out there. Has anyone ever heard of that being done?