What's a fair swap when stacks are different? l Strategy with Barry

What would make a good day two swap deal when you and a friend have wildly different stack sizes? Luckily, there is a new app for that.

Last month, I did a swap deal in a tournament at the start of Day 2. Around 59 players remained; 39 got paid. I had 147,000 in chips, and the player I swapped with had 67,000. The average was around 200,000. 

I had a little more than double what the player I swapped with had, so I reasoned it was a fair deal, that I got 10% and he got 5%. He agreed, and then we both heroically went on to bust before the money, making the rest of this conversation moot. 

He was a better player than I, so I felt that my getting only double his percentage when I had more than double the chips evened out to a fair deal.

ICM punishes big stacks

Funnily enough, Derek Wolters has just released a new free app called ICM Swap, which answered this question for me. I have no affiliation with Derek or the app, other than being an admirer of his X-account, which provides ICM values during the World Series of Poker. 

I plugged in the metrics as I understand them, and this is what it gave me:

It turns out my friend getting 5% was equivalent to me getting 9.5%, based on our stack sizes.

In hindsight, this makes perfect sense. ICM rewards short stacks and punishes big stacks. In fact, one of the most important mantras of ICM is that the fewer chips you have, the more each is worth. You only have to look at how short stacks tend to get the relatively best deals in ICM final table deals to know this is true. 

So even though I thought I was doing my friend a favour, it turns out he had the raw end of the deal. In fact, when you factor in the skill difference between the two of us, a fair deal might have looked like 9% to me, 5% to him.