How should we treat ICM if some people are completely ignoring it because they only care about winning the tournament outright?
Once you have the basics down, ICM is probably the most important concept you need to learn in tournaments. Understanding what your chips are worth in real money terms should shape every decision of a tournament, especially how it impacts your raising and calling ranges in the latter stages. Players who ignore ICM are long term burning money in tournament poker.
There is one particular series where even good players often throw out ICM and that is the World Series of Poker. Bracelets are so coveted that for some players they are more important than the actual money prizes. Often in tournaments a ChipEV call becomes an ICM fold, especially when big pay jumps are involved. When you are only playing for a bracelet the tournament becomes a ChipEV event.
There are players who would happily have a losing money series at the WSOP but come home on cloud nine because they won a bracelet, especially if it’s their first bracelet. There is also an additional value for some players that comes after winning the bracelet. If you come from a country that has never had a bracelet winner before there is a lot of extra EV in being the first, it could even lead to endorsement deals and the like. So although it might be a long term losing play to ignore ICM is WSOP events, it can be worth risking some equity to get that gold.
How much is a bracelet worth to you?
There are spots where big hands are an easy fold in the payout stages of a tournament even though it might be profitable from a chip perspective. If your opponent is playing for the money first and foremost, then you can put them under pressure assuming they know this. If, however, your opponent is playing for the bracelet you might find them looking you up with hands they should be folding.
The bracelet is worth something to everybody but it’s worth a different amount to each of them. Strategically it’s probably most important to decide how much the bracelet is worth to you and then how much it is worth to the players at your table, and adjust your ranges accordingly.
If somebody is ‘going for the win’ then you have to adjust your ranges and not expect your shoves to get through easily. This doesn’t mean necessarily playing less hands, just changing the shape of your range for value. This is a useful exercise to do in a solver like Holdem Resources Calculator anyway, even for non bracelet events, because there are plenty of players who do not understand or wilfully ignore ICM in tournaments. It’s also quite handy in general to put notes on players as to whether they understand ICM or not.
If you are fortunate enough to get to the bubble and then final table stages of the tournament you will likely see a massive divide between the two player types. Some players will hang on for grim death to get a WSOP cash and at the final table the pay jumps tend to be huge. Others will be going for that bracelet. If nothing else, deciding which group each player belongs to is incredibly valuable in bracelet events.
Dara O’Kearney’s new book PKO Poker Strategy is available on kindle or paperback at Amazon right now.
More from Dara O’Kearney
source https://casinonewsblogger.com/is-icm-different-in-bracelet-events/
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