Over the past two and a half years I’ve written three articles for TPE on the theme of ‘Profitability Thresholds’. Loosely speaking, they’re all in an attempt to figure out which spots we should take, and which we shouldn’t, since there’s so much debate out there on the idea of ‘waiting for a better spot’. In recent days I’ve come up with a new model that adds to my previous conclusions, and I wanted to share it with you all. Here are the previous articles, so that you can get caught up:
https://www.tournamentpokeredge.com/profitability-thresholds-why-icm-isnt-just-for-final-tables/
https://www.tournamentpokeredge.com/profitability-thresholds-iii-the-variable-edge-model/
You’ll see that they all relate in varying degrees to the concepts of chipEV, EVbb/100 winrates, and ICM concerns. Each of these things is a consideration when evaluating the benefit of a certain situation in tournaments, and so we must decide at each point which of the three factors is most important. I’d like to posit a framework for understanding these decisions, and it involves perceiving the three concepts in a graphical triangle, which I’ll call, “The Pyramid of Profit”, because it’s fun to give things dramatic-sounding names. Let’s take a look.
The Pyramid of Profit
The first level: chipEV and building a stack
The lower part of the triangle is represented by chipEV. These are the baseline decisions we make in tournaments – we’re trying to make +EV plays, obviously. Every situation has a chipEV value attached to it, even if we might only be able to make a vague guess at what that might be – in this respect, chipEV is the most fundamental of the three concepts, because if we can’t even make profitable chipEV plays, we have no hope of being able to achieve a positive ROI in tournaments.
However, chipEV is only part of the equation – as I’ve outlined in my previous articles, there are spots where we don’t just want to take every chip we can get right now. Sometimes we’ll have to worry about ICM – particularly at final tables – and sometimes we’ll have to consider our future edge in the tournament when deciding which spots are valuable enough to take. Nevertheless, we should see chipEV as the foundation of all our decision-making in tournament poker.
The second level: Our future edge in EVbb/100
As I explained in the third of my previous articles, there will be times when our future edge in the tournament outweighs our desire to gain every possible chip right away. If we have a particularly big postflop edge at a weak table, we may not want to take every thin 3-bet bluff spot, for example. We may not want to take a preflop shove spot that’s marginally above breakeven if we’re a good short-stack player at a table full of nits.
The problem, though, is that most people forget how hard it is to actually make profit, especially at middle-to-short stack depths – it’s really hard to have a winrate above 5 EVbb/100 at 20bb stacks, for example. When we’re making 5bb/100, we’re making 0.05bb/hand, which means folding away a 0.5bb profit takes us ten hands to recover. Thus, as stacks get shorter, we have to seriously consider that our future edge in the tournament will reduce to the point where folding away any kind of profitable spot is undesirable.
The pinnacle: ICM considerations
Finally, we have to look at ICM as the factor which has the biggest influence on our ROI, since it’s most relevant in spots that have a high $EV attached to them – in the money and at the final table. For that reason, it’s at the pinnacle of the pyramid, since it’s most relevant towards the end of the tournament and any mistake we make in ICM terms can cost us much more than a simple chipEV mistake early in a tournament ever could.
The further we get into the tournament, the more important ICM becomes, with the slight exception of the money bubble being a period where ICM might outweigh chipEV or EVbb/100 factors. However, we should always keep in mind that ICM has limitations – there are certain times where our future edge at a specific final table might justify taking a marginally -$EV ICM spot with the intention of generating future +$EV spots given our EVbb/100 expectation, or where a spot might be so overwhelmingly +chipEV that we may be justified in taking a breakeven $EV play.
Conversely, if we’re at a tough final table where other players have the edge over us in terms of skill level and winrates, we should assume that there will not be so many future opportunities for profit on our part in chipEV terms – thus lowering our EVbb/100 – and therefore an opportunity to gain even a little bit of $EV profit should be welcomed with open arms.
Putting it all together in-game
When it comes to how to actually use these concepts in-game, it’s actually surprisingly simple – the further you get into the tournament, the higher you go up the pyramid. At the very beginning, ICM is almost irrelevant and your future edge in EVbb/100 might be very big, so there’s little justification for risking large amounts of chips to take an incredibly thin spot. We should be looking for spots on the basis that they generate a good amount of chipEV without neutralising our future edge by punting off big portions of chips unnecessarily.
As you progress into the middle stages, your potential future edge becomes more and more important. Your consideration of how big this edge might be should strongly affect your choices as regards to your aggression levels, since the shortening of effective stacks into the 0-50bb range will make high winrates difficult to achieve as well as forcing us to risk our entire stack (and thus all of our tournament equity) more frequently. We should strongly consider taking thinner and thinner chipEV spots as our stack (and our future EVbb/100 edge) decreases, especially at tables where we think we might be outmatched in terms of skill. Note that there is still no disadvantage to taking -chipEV spots – it’s more or less impossible for our edge to change so much from one stack size to another that it justifies making unprofitable plays to try to build a big stack.
Finally, the closer we get to the final table, the more we have to forego chipEV and EVbb/100 considerations in favour of ICM. The last thing we want to do is punt off all our tournament equity, because every chip we gain is worth less than a chip we lose when ICM is part of the equation. The last chip in your stack is the most valuable. That’s not to say that we should play overly tight – more so that we should avoid risking our stack against players who have us covered wherever it’s reasonable, and focus instead on exploiting those players shorter than us, whom ICM is forcing to fold more often to our aggression. Remember, though, that if a play is -chipEV, there’s no way it can be a good idea, so that’s why chipEV is our foundation.
Obviously there will be grey areas where spots fall into two categories at once to some extent, and some ambiguity is present – for example, when 50% of the field has busted or when there are three or four tables left – but generally the pyramid concept will hold true in all tournament situations. Next time you find yourself trying to figure out whether a certain spot is profitable enough, consider approaching it in accordance with this model, and you might be able to figure out whether ‘waiting for a better spot’ is really justified.
