Laymans ICM please!!

Ive been looking into and reading alot on ICM for bubble and beyond play.

Could someone please treat me like a 2 year old and try to explain to me in the most simplest of terms how this works?

I understand that it gives an equity value of my stack in $ value to the prize pool. But how do i use this info and/or adjust my play?

Remember , 2 year old please!

Its way too complicated to make it simple, and really at the end of the day its largely about learning situations by rote. Noone does the maths at the table. However heres my attempt to make it simple as far as how you should be playing in an ICM friendly style in STTs.

ICM basically tells us that the chips in our stack are worth more than the chips we can win (i.e., if we get ai on the first hand and win, we're only slightly more likely to win the tourney, but if we lose we have zero chance to win). Therefore we're only interest in playing hands early when we think we're likely to be favorite (or have very good implied odds which normally only refers to set camping very early on). One way to think of this, is we try to avoid situations where we can be dominated. AQ can be dominated by AK so we probably dont call a raise, but might make one, but AJ can be dominated by both AQ and AK so we're really not happy about it anytime. Thats the kind of situation we're looking to avoid.

Mid-game the blinds are now worth enough to take some risks. We'll make occassional steal attempts, but generally only from position and in favorable circumstances (i.e., fair chance blinds will fold).

Late game the blinds are a fair proportion of our stack, so its worth taking a chance to get them. Because they're worth so much, we want to maximise our chance to get them, so we would normally maximise our fold equity by pushing.

ICM is largely the maths we need to use to decide whether to push or not (or call a push), however a general rule is that if you have less than say 13-14 BBs, your only options are really push or fold (hence refered to as p/f poker). If you want to play a hand, you need to be pushing it almost always by this stage. Learning when to push or not is a matter of using ICM to review spots after you play and finding which were +EV spots to push and remembering them for next time.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I feellike ive just had a thorn removed!!

cheers mate.

if your playing now can i rail you?

Just starting a set up now if you want to msg me on msn or I can jump in ftr chatroom if you like.

Chatrooms good!?

Originally Posted by Hotfrog

Chatrooms good!?

Just chiming in and suggesting you check out the sticky in the community forum about our IRC channel, not the flash chat here on the site.

I was the same regarding ICM, EV and equity. For some reason, I just tune out when it comes to maths and I get nowhere fast.

What has been said is good. What really helped me though was a thorough one on one explanation which catered to my learning style. All this lesson did was teach the info you can find anywhere on the web - but it was far more accessible for me. It also showed the light as to why playing for 2nd place is not a good tactic. 1st or 3rd - but never 2nd.

ICM also explains the difference between $ev (dollar ev) and Cev (chip ev) and that the more chips you have, the less they are worth and vice versa. Eg:
you buy into a 10 man SNG for $10 + $1, 1st place wins $50 and you start with 1500 chips. Your chips, therefore, are worth $10. Now, let's say you win that SNG and finish with all 15000 chips, have you won $100 (10 x $10)? No, you only won $50. Likewise, you can be the short stack with 750 chips and crash out in 3rd place. Your 1/2 stack should equal $5 right? But no, it still cost you $10 and so each chip is now worth double. And as you finished 3rd, you have won $20!

For railing I find the chatroom better, for the simple reason its so empty you can usually have a private session rather than getting lost in in all the IRC chat. For general poker chat I agree IRC is cool.

Just a note. IRC has a private messaging feature as well. FWIW.