Adjusting to ICM at Tournament Final Tables

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If you’re not familiar with the concept of ICM as it relates to tournament poker, now is the time to start. Understanding ICM is as crucial to long-term success in poker as your ability to pick good spots to 3bet light, choose the right flops to continuation bet, or decide on a preflop shoving range. If you’re not ICM aware – or worse, if you’re aware of the concept but simply choose to ignore it, a strategy adopted by a surprisingly large number of players – then you are quite simply costing yourself big buckets of money.

So, what is ICM? For those who might be unfamiliar with the concept, ICM stands for Independent Chip Model, a mathematical model designed to assign a monetary value to every chip in play during a poker tournament. It reinforces the concept that your goal in poker tournaments is not to make the most chips, but to make the most money – the nature of ICM can turn many profitable plays into horrible losing plays once the effects of the model are considered. The key impact it has is to make final table dynamics heavily geared towards reinforcing the value of simply continuing to be in the tournament – if you’re at the final table with 1% of the chips, you at least have 1% equity in the remaining prizepool. If you bust out, you get your prize money but you have 0% equity in whatever’s left. ICM doesn’t account for skill edges, but it does give a very accurate perspective on each player’s equity in the overall tournament prize pool bearing in mind their current stack. It forces players to stop thinking about decision-making in terms of ChipEV, and start thinking in terms of $EV, and the two are often very different. Short stacks are forced to wait each other out, middle stacks are forced to wait the short stacks out, and the big stacks have the freedom to brutalize everyone and take full advantage. The shorter the shortest stacks at the table and the bigger the gaps between stacks, the more pronounced the effect of ICM, and the more willing you should be to wait for the next bustout before you risk your tournament life.

So what are the key things to remember when considering how to adjust to ICM? How can you use ICM to your advantage at final tables? Here are a few basics on how to improve your understanding of the concept, and how to adjust your play in light of it.

Study ICM, but don’t try to do the math in real-time

The time for studying ICM and making ICM calculations is away from the table. It’s important to look back at your past final tables and the decisions you made that risked your tournament life, and use a tool like the ICMIZER calculator help you learn more about the concept. The reason why analysing past hands is so important is because ICM is such a complex concept that it can only really be learned in an ethereal, impractical way – no-one could possibly do an ICM calculation in their head during a tournament, and even using a calculator to do it in real-time would probably use up the bulk of your time bank at a final table. This is because you need to know the exact stack sizes and the exact prize pool remaining in the tournament, as well as the specific ranges for each player involved in the hand you’re analysing. The way to learn ICM isn’t by doing it at the tables – it’s by running scenario after scenario, hand after hand, and simply developing an instinct for the concept and a ‘feeling’ for what kinds of impacts it has, as well as an understanding of which factors influence ICM decision-making the most. Try running the same scenario with different calling ranges or different stack sizes and you will find that the same play can either be wildly profitable or horrifically bad.

Consider tournament structure and future edges

When at a major table and considering the ICM implications of your stack size and the plays you make, bear in mind that the model does not include any kind of adjustments for your skill level, the likelihood of you winning the tournament based on the other players’ skill levels or playing styles, the structure of the tournament, the average stack size, or anything else of that nature. This means that in a tournament where the structure is great, stacks are deep and your edge is great, you should be even more ICM aware than usual, because one big ICM mistake could cost you not only in pure ICM terms, but also in terms of your future edge once the tournament gets 3-handed or heads-up. If you’re three-handed in a tournament, you’re a great heads-up player and you think you would win heads-up 60% of the time against either of the other two players, you should be even more willing to make tight folds or plays that simply give you the best possible chance of making it to heads-up. Conversely, if you’re at the final table of a turbo tournament where edges are smaller and stacks are shorter, situations where you’re making razor-thin ICM decisions one way or another – perhaps decisions where the right and wrong decisions are 1% or 2% apart from one another and you can’t possibly know for sure – you’re going to have to accept that each of your decisions is a high-variance one, and there’s a higher chance you’ll make an ICM mistake by calling that shove with Ace-seven offsuit instead of only calling Ace-eight suited plus. This is one of the major factors in why many turbo tournaments with bigger prizepools end up in four-way or five-way deals – the variance is so high that it forces players to make ICM decisions where if they’re even 1% or 2% wrong, they’re literally costing themselves thousands of dollars in EV.

Be aware of others’ level of ICM awareness

When entering a major final table, just as it’s important to develop solid reads on all the other players, it’s crucial to understand exactly which players are aware of ICM and which ones aren’t, and how the players who are ICM aware are adapting. The nature of ICM means that, somewhat frustratingly, other players’ lack of ICM awareness can turn your good plays into bad ones. For example, if you’re at a final table where you’re seven-handed and there’s a 2bb stack under the gun who’ll probably be all-in next hand because he just lost a flip, and it folds to you in the small blind with the big blind having 8bb. Off the top of my head, it’s almost certainly massively +$EV for you to shove all-in on the big blind with any two cards here, because the big blind can’t call very wide at all with such a short stack left at the table. He should probably fold some weak Ace-X hands here, and definitely fold all weak King-X hands (N.B. This is just a made-up scenario – it’s almost impossible to even know whether my assertions about the big blind’s profitable calling range are either right or wrong without constructing a prize pool and a bunch of other stack sizes to complete the scenario).

However, if the big blind decides to snap-call us with King-four offsuit, that will immediately make our play of shoving any two cards less profitable, because we didn’t have as much fold equity as we thought we did. This is the beginning of an endless levelling cycle, because our shoving range is based on his perceived calling range, which is based on the short stack at the table, and his actual calling range is based on our perceived shoving range, which is based on his awareness of our awareness of the short stack at the table. Have I lost you yet?! If we were aware that he would call with King-four offsuit despite the short stack, we might not have shoved any two cards. Essentially what it means is that if our opponents are not aware of ICM and decide to make marginal plays that put their tournament at risk in unnecessary spots, it negates our ability to make correct ICM plays, because our plays are based on the assumption that they won’t risk their stacks unnecessarily. This leads to some situations where an opponent’s ICM mistake will lead to them doubling up, and level out the overall stack distribution, which correspondingly hands over a certain percentage of our tournament equity to the other players without them ever having to do anything.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that weaker players or ICM-unaware players don’t fold as much as we think – indeed, sometimes they’ll be so desperate to move up the pay ladder that they’ll fold way more than they should – but it does mean that, as with any situation in poker, we have to adapt our own application of theoretical concepts to cater for the information we have about other players’ particular styles and levels of ability.

Make unconventional plays

ICM will sometimes lead to some sticky situations. It might lead to scenarios where you’re being ruthlessly abused by a bigger stack, or you’re completely handcuffed by the presence of a shorter stack or the structure of a tournament. These are the situations where you need to think outside the box. In many instances, if there’s a short stack at the table and your open-raise with Ace-queen gets 3bet by the big stack, you won’t necessarily want to make the play of 4betting small to induce action, because it’s a nightmare scenario for you if the big stack shoves his pocket fives and forces you to either fold, or take a coinflip for your tournament life. In these instances, it can be perfectly acceptable to make all-in shoves for larger stacks than you usually would, or flat-call 3bets in spots you usually wouldn’t. These strategies can help you to adapt to the players who are trying to exploit your ICM vulnerability in lower-variance ways. Similarly, you might consider open-limping certain hands from the cutoff, button or small blind, or defending the big blind versus an open-raise with a hand you might normally shove. A willingness to simply allow yourself to be exploited is also necessary at times – there will be instances where you either have to raise/fold a much stronger hand than usual, or simply resist the temptation to open-raise many hands at all in anticipation of being exploited by an aggressive chip leader. Sometimes, the best way to exploit other players in light of ICM is just to fold more hands.

“Forget ICM, I always go for the win!”

Finally, the above sentence is probably one of the worst ideas you could have in your head as a tournament player. It’s equivalent to saying “forget hands and their equities, I always play nine-seven suited!”. Understanding and adhering to ICM is an unavoidable and crucial aspect of profitable tournament poker, and the more correct ICM plays you make, the more money you will make in the long run. ‘Playing for the win’ is a short-term mindset that’s usually perpetuated by players who think they’re too cool to make the right play when that play involves folding, and I would imagine many of the players who adopt this mindset would be shocked to find out how unprofitable some of their past decisions were. I’ve even seen some ICM-aware players who are otherwise very good at tournament poker make some horrendous final table blowups, where they risked huge amounts of chips in situations where it was totally unnecessary. ICM is here to stay – understand it, adjust to it, practice it, and your ROI will skyrocket.