Web ICM Calculator Available at HoldemResources.net

Knowing the basics behind ICM, or Independent Chip Model, is one of the key elements of any tournament player’s success at the tables.  Whether you play sit and gos or multi-table tournaments, live or online, having a strong grasp of knowing the necessary ranges for shoving and folding can mean the difference between appearing as a featured player on ESPN and begging in the street because you blew your mortgage.

Most ICM calculators require a download and installation or are part of a bigger software package that requires that you shell out a few pretty pennies for.  The good news is that a brand new and free beta version of an ICM calculator is available at HoldemResources.net.  This beta edition of a web-based simulation software features an ICM Nash Calculator without hand ranking restrictions.  It also has a display of calculated ranges and shows EV for specific hands:



Some coming attractions for the application include improved stability and performance, GUI (Graphical User Interface) tweaking, allowing manual overrides of ranges to incorporate reads, and additional user controls over the fictitious play calculations.

Users are urged to remember that the program is still in the early stages of beta testing.  It was posted in the TwoPlusTwo forums that there is a good chance you will experience some bugs, which should be posted in the official thread for the program.  General feedback and suggestions are also welcomed.  The current edition is restricted to a maximum of six players, but the final edition will allow nine or 10.

The calculator accepts mixed strategies and, with more iterations, the mixed hands converge to 0EB as they mathematically should.  But as posted, after just 300 iterations, the ranges are looking pretty close to optimal.  Just this week, the application received an update where the hand section no longer causes errors.  In addition, the GUI was updated so that you can change ranges by simply entering the desired percentage.  The range is constructed as the top X% of hands sorted by EV.

For those of you unfamiliar with the straight theory of ICM, it’s a way for you to think about your stack in an effective manner.  In tournaments, when your stack goes down, the value of your remaining chips increases.  In theory, a stack with 10,000 in chips is worth a little more than 10% of a stack with 100,000 chips.  Why?  Because of the distribution of the prize structure in the tournament.

To calculate the actual value of a player’s tournament chips, you have to assume that a player’s chances of winning the tournament are equal to his or her share of the total chips in play.  Because of the distributed prize structure in poker tournaments, first prize isn’t the only one that makes money.  Second place also wins money and you also have a chance finishing in first or second, which adds to your overall equity.

To calculated the expected value in the tournament based on your chip stack, a calculator would need to find the probabilities of you finishing in each one of the paid places multiplied by the corresponding prize money and added up to find the equity. Now, bring in the Nash Equilibrium theory, which is a game theory concept explaining that when each player knows the equilibrium strategies of everyone else, no player has anything to gain by changing their strategy.

In the end, knowing the theory is one thing, but actually having the tool available is a completely different level of resource.  The web application allows you to start a new hand, put in the structure, the number of players, and their stacks.  Hit a button and the program does the calculations for you.  It’ll spit out the stack, chip percentage, and pre and post equity and differential.  You can run as many examples as you’d like and as stated before, if you encounter any errors or think of any suggestions, send them into developers.