How costly is an ICM punt?

Just how big a financial impact can making an ICM mistake at a final table be? Dara O'Kearney has the info and you may need to sit down for this....

They may not come around very often, but as a tournament player the biggest decisions you make in your poker year are ICM decisions. This includes both in-game decisions and also final table deal making considerations. 

Some people are reluctant to study ICM because the big spots don’t come up very often and the stacks tend to be shallow, so they assume that luck plays the biggest part. This is the wrong way to think about ICM. It is true that shallow stack play has the least edge of all the stack depths, but making a shallow endgame mistake is the most costly error you can make, so you better get this area of study mastered.

To give you an idea of what I am talking about this is a hand from my book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book. This is the 15 big blind calling range for the Small Blind at a final table with five players remaining, the Button who covers them has shoved. This table is from Holdem Resources Calculator and the hands within the border are profitable calls. The number below them is the percentage of the remaining prize pool the call wins, on average (it's small, click on the image for a bigger version). So in the example below AA wins you 5.92% of the remaining prize pool on average, but 99 is a breakeven call.

Let’s say you play $11 MTTs and this was a small final table with five players remaining and 180 runners started. If you had a typical PokerStars payout structure that would leave about $1,342 in the prize pool. It might look something like this:

Going back to the HRC grid, the call with Aces would earn you on average $79.44 (5.92% of $1,342). If you incorrectly called with KQs you would lose on average $20.40 (1.52% of $1,342) or two buy-ins. If you took a wild punt with Pocket Twos you would lose $44.55 (3.32% of $1,342) on average, or four buy-ins.

What about if you were in the same table line up facing the same decision, but you were on your biggest final table of the year for the same $11 buy-in? To give a lofty example, let’s say it was the $11 Sunday Storm and it attracted 14,513 runners? The final table for that would pay out like this:

Same buy-in, exact same spot calling a 15 big blind shove, but now the prize pool is $40,396.49. Now that AA call earns you a very healthy $2,391.47, but you were always calling with Aces. The KQs hand, which was one of the first hands just below the calling range, now loses you $614.02 – that is a 55 buy-in mistake. The punt with pocket twos costs you $1,341.16 which is a 121 buy-in mistake.

This is an extreme example but you will make one or two big final tables in a poker year where the money means something similar to you, relatively, in terms of your bankroll. Most players know that making these sorts of errors on the bubble are bad, but few realise just how costly they are once you are in the money too. In our example AQs is a call but KQs is a fold, and getting that wrong costs us 55 buy-ins on average. That is a huge mistake for what some might consider a close error.

This example also reminds us why studying calls should be top of your list for MTT study. 

People don’t think they need to study ICM until it’s too late when they make a massive error and punt away a ton of equity. In my book we take a deep dive into the topic of ICM and how it influences every aspect of tournament play. This includes understanding the real money value of your chips throughout the tournament. Your knowledge of ICM genuinely will determine how your poker year goes if you can avoid making two of three massive ICM mistakes when it really matters.

Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.