ICM Cruncher Released for iPhone

With all of the silly and pointless iPhone Apps out there – yes, I’m talking about you iBeer, iFart, and iBouncer – there’s no telling how much time people waste when they could be doing something productive. Sure, playing Pong with Oprah’s head might be fun for a few minutes, but why bother when you could be honing your hand reading and push/fold skills?

From the developers of Poker Cruncher – the advanced iPhone hand range odds calculator – comes ICM Cruncher, a newly released Independent Chip Modeling (ICM) application. Whereas Poker Cruncher is essentially PokerStove for your phone, ICM Cruncher gets into the nitty-gritty of ICM calculations, which are vital to poker in ways like final table deal-making and push/fold/call decisions deep in tournaments and sit and gos. Here’s a preview:



For those who are unfamiliar with the theory of ICM, it’s essentially a method of representing your equity at any given time in a tournament. Based on the remaining stack sizes and payout structure, ICM calculates what your chips are worth in dollars given how your stack and the payouts will affect your finish. Expressed as an average, ICM numbers allow you to compare the amount risked by making a certain play to the potential reward.

ICM Cruncher can handle up to ten players and analyze ten payouts. It also allows you to save the settings for favorite or common payout structures and exports data directly to e-mail. Admittedly, these features are common among other ICM Apps, so what sets ICM Cruncher apart?

According to its lead developer, ICM Cruncher is the only application that boasts decision analyzers, which function by answering these questions: “Call all-in or fold?” and “Push all-in or fold?” Using variables such as stack sizes, payout structure, chips in the pot, and the villain and hero, ICM Cruncher estimates your equity versus the villain’s range of hands and lets you know whether to call or fold. When you’re faced with a shove or fold situation, the App will spit out how often the villain will call your shove and your equity versus the range he would most likely call with.

In both cases, the decision analyzers run the different scenarios – you fold, you call and lose, and you call and win – and combine them to let you know which action is more profitable and by how much. Additionally, if your hand range detective skills are good enough, ICM Cruncher can give you your breakeven equity versus your perceived range of the villain’s hands to figure out what holdings you can profitably call with.

Since many of ICM Cruncher’s functions require estimating ranges, using it in tandem with Poker Cruncher is extremely convenient. Poker Cruncher will run you $4.99, but ICM Cruncher can be had for $1.99. You could do worse than these powerful tools for $7, especially considering how much they can improve your game. Alternatively, you could spend those bus rides to work by using your iPhone to sip fake beer, make fart noises, or send Donald Trump’s head Ponging around in cyber space. The choice is yours.