Putting ICM Calculators to use in Poker Sit ‘N Go Tournaments

One of the most important first steps that you can take to helping yourself in Sit ‘N Go tournaments is to choose an ICM calculator. Simply put, no one should be sitting at a table figuring out the value of a call/fold decision if they don’t have to. The math is tough – certainly tougher than in cash games – so you should take all the help that you can get. In this instance, Independent Chip Modeling calculators will take all of the really hard work out of your hands and leave you to play poker. That’s what you bought in for, right?

In order to understand how to use an ICM calculator, let us take a look at a real life application of the theory. Maybe you have had good success in your current tournament and you are one of only three remaining players. You are sitting in the big blind with 8000 chips, while the player in the small blind shares the chip lead with you. The guy on the button only has 4000 chips, so you are one of two players in a real power position. You are playing in a pretty typical Sit ‘N Go, so the payout structure goes 50-30-20 in terms of percentage. At this point, the blinds have gone up to 300/600. Then a solid poker moment comes through for you. You look down at a really nice pair of Queens in your big blind. Short handed, this is an absolute beast of a hand. Right in front of you, the small blind (who shares the chip lead) throws all of his chips into the pot. In your time at the table, you have seen that this player will make such a move with a hand like Ace-King. What is your play here?

This is one of those situations where the ICM calculator can really help you out in a big way. You can come to figure out exactly what the value of your move here is. What you want to figure out is what your expected value would be if you were to throw away your hand, if you were to call the bet and win, and if you were to make a call and end up losing the hand. Because you are holding Queens, there is little chance that you will split the pot, so that is not even worth considering.

You know that if you fold your hand, the guy sitting on the button is going to remain with 4000 chips, you are going to be down to 7400, and the small blind would pick up some chips and stand at 8600. Using your tournament calculator, you can figure out exactly how much value you get my making the moves at hand. Put the numbers into your calculator quickly and figure out that you have an ICM number that equals 0.3482. This means that in a tournament where the buy-in is $20, you can expect to win $69.64 each time. This obviously will not be the case each and every time, but if you were to play out the exactly same situation, this is what you would earn on average. It’s a pretty good payday, if you’re honest with yourself.

Because we have the fancy calculator at our disposal, we should take the time to evaluate some of the other outcomes, though. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out the value that would happen if you make the call and he happens to beat you with Ace-King. You are out of money and you end up with a .2 value. You win $40 and go home relatively happy that you have almost doubled your money (after taking out the $2 tournament fee). But what happens when you stand up to the guy and make your call with the pocket Queens? In this case, you would own 1600 chips and the guy on the button will be severely short stacked with only 4000. In that instance, you would have a value of .46. You are winning $92 on average.

So now let’s put these things to work. What value do you get out of making this sort of call? Just about anyone who has ever turned on the World Series of Poker knows that a pair of Queens will hold up around 56% of the time when it is put up against Ace-King. This means that exactly 56% of instances will leave you with that nice expected value of .46. The flip side of that is that obviously 44% of instances will leave us with the .20 value. Doing some simple calculations we can discover that this gives us a real expected value of 0.3457. The expected value of folding the Queens in this spot, as we discovered a little bit earlier, is .3482. If these numbers hold true, we should fold in that instance to get the most value. In this particular instance, the difference in the numbers is not big, and will amount to about fifty cents over the long haul.

Then, you have to throw a more practical application into the mix to make sure that you are making the right decision. Because the difference only gives folding a small advantage if you are certain the other player has AK, you have to make the call in this instance. The chances that he is pushing all-in, on a short table, with something not as good as Ace-King is pretty good. Even if he does happen to have Ace-King, you have seen that the value isn’t that bad in making a call. The obvious negative to this would be if your opponent has Kings or Aces, but this is countered by the situations where he pushes all-in with Jacks or something like Ace-Queen.

So what is the key to this idea? It’s that you need to adjust your thinking a little bit. Most players will be very happy that they are just in the money, so they will take big risks. You don’t want to get yourself in a situation where all of your chips are at risk in a race type of situation. In this case, the chances are strong that you are a big favorite, so a call would be the play. Many times, people make the mistake of calling with 10s or Jacks, only to find that they are now in a coin flip for all of their chips when they would have had more value by waiting it out a little bit more.