How To Deal Out Poker Chips

ICM or “Independent Chip Model” is a term which will inevitably cross your way if you’re a poker tournament player. In this article we want to explain in detail what ICM means in poker and what this model is used for.

• How To Deal Out Poker Chips Zynga Poker
• How To Deal Out Poker Chips
• How To Deal Out Poker Chips Free

After months of negotiations, Trademark Poker worked out a deal with Paulson to sell their all clay poker chips to the home use market. Trademark Poker is the EXCLUSIVE distributor of genuine Paulson chips. Design your own chip and retain the exclusivity on your chip. We will advertise your chip here with your sale link. In casino poker, you play for table stakes. This means that you play with the chips that you have on the table. You’re not allowed to go into your pocket for more money in the middle of a hand. If you run out of chips you announce that you are “All IN” and you will only be eligible for the money in that pot up to that point. With all three chips together on top of each other, the player separates the middle chips out in his other fingers, twirls that chips, and then is able to slide it in between the other two chips. It takes some nimble fingers and is a step up from the riffle. Here’s a short tutorial on twirling those chips.

How To Deal Out Poker Chips Zynga Poker

What is a chip worth in a poker tournament?

The background to ICM is a very simple question: What is a chip worth in a poker tournament?

For a poker player in a tournament it is important to know how much his chips are worth at each moment. The specific question is: How much prize money can a player expect to win with his chips in the long run?

How much is it worth doubling your stack, how catastrophic is it to lose half your stack? Such questions are essential for a tournament player. But the special nature of poker tournaments doesn’t make it easy to answer those questions. Having twice as many chips doesn’t mean you will win twice as much in the long run.

Often it’s more important to simply survive the bubble with a few chips than to have slightly more chips. Just by looking at the number of chips you have, you can’t tell exactly how well you’re doing in a tournament. You also need to know what these chips are worth.

Measuring the value of chips

Let’s examine the question “What is a chip worth in a poker tournament?” using an example:

Example Tournament

• Buy-In: $10
• Players: 10
• Payouts: 1. $50, 2. $30, 3. $20
• Initial stack: 1,000 chips

If every player gets 1,000 chips at the beginning, they are worth exactly 10 dollars before the first hand is dealt (we just ignore rake to make things easier). But as the game progresses, the value of these chips changes and 1,000 chips can be worth a lot more and a lot less than $10.

• Chips can be worth more: Let’s say a specific player barely makes it through to the last three and still has only 1,000 chips, while his two opponents each have 4,500 chips. Then these 1,000 chips are obviously worth at least 20 dollars, because the prize money for third place is guaranteed. Even if a player made it to the last three with just one chip, that single chip would still be worth $20 – so the value of the chips can increase drastically during the tournament.
• Chips can be worth less: At the same time, the value of chips can also decrease: Whoever wins the Sit-And-Go at the end will have all 10,000 chips, but will only receive $50 prize money. So his chips will only have a value of $5 per 1,000 chips.

For a long time there were different models that tried to explain how much a chip is actually worth. In the excellent, albeit rather theoretical book Mathematics of Poker, various methods of assigning a definite monetary value tournament chips were discussed. In the end, the “Independent Chip Model”, or ICM for short, prevailed.

How does the ICM work?

The ICM considers the stacks of all players remaining in the tournament and the payout structure. With this information the ICM algorithm calculates the expected value for each remaining player. This algorithm is rather difficult, we give a brief explanation.

Here’s how the ICM algorithm works:

• Probability of finishing first: First the stack sizes are used to calculate the probability for each player to finish first. The model simply assumes that a player with X percent of all the chips also wins the tournament in X percent of all cases.
• Probability of finishing second, third, etc.: Then, in a similar way, the model calculates for each player how likely it is that he will come second, third, fourth, etc. However, these calculations are much more complicated. The probability that a player will finish second place is calculated by looking at all cases in which the player does not win. Then the stack of the winner is removed and the probability that the player will finish second is determined by the proportion of his chips to the remaining chips and all the probabilities weighted are added together. The same procedure is used for the other places.
• Expected Values: In the end the model multiplies the probabilities for each player’s finish distribution with the payouts, adds them together and gives an expected value for each player.

You can’t do such calculations in your head, because for 4 players you already need dozens of arithmetic steps. But fortunately there are a lot of ICM calculators online. For example try our advanced ICM Deal Calculator.

ICM in tournaments using an example

Let’s take the above example tournament again:

Example Tournament

• Buy-In: $10
• Players: 10
• Payouts: 1. $50, 2. $30, 3. $20
• Initial stack: 1,000 chips

Suppose there are still 4 players in the tournament and those are the chip counts:

Chip counts of the last 4 players

• Player 1: 5,000 chips
• Player 2: 2,000 chips
• Player 3: 2,000 chips
• Player 4: 1,000 chips

How To Deal Out Poker Chips

What are these chips worth according to the ICM model? We simply enter the data into an ICM calculator and obtain the following result:

ICM value of these stacks

• Player 1: 5,000 chips ≅ $37.18
• Player 2: 2,000 chips ≅ $24.33
• Player 3: 2,000 chips ≅ $24.33
• Player 4: 1,000 chips ≅ $14.17

This means that if all players are equally good, they will win those amounts of prize money in the long run. Player 1, with half of all chips, can expect much more than the prize money for second place, players 2 and 3 can expect a little more than the prize money for third place and even player 4, who has the fewest chips, can expect to win some prize money in the long run.

Making decisions with the help of ICM?

How can ICM help to make meaningful decisions in tournaments? Let’s go back to our example.

For the sake of simplicity, we will pretend that there are no blinds and examine a specific tournament situation:

Example situation in a tournament

• Player 1: BU – 5,000 chips
• Player 2: SB – 2,000 chips
• Player 3 (Hero): BB – 2,000 chips – holds A♥ 9♦
• Player 4: UTG – 1,000 chips

Action: Player 4 folds, player 1 folds, player 2 goes all-in (2,000 chips), player 3 … ?

How To Deal Out Poker Chips Free

Player 3 is exposed to an all-in and what should he do now? Let’s say he knows his opponent, player 2, very well and estimates that he bluffs quite often and only sometimes has a better hand. Overall, player 3 expects to win the showdown in 60 percent of all cases when he calls.

So should he call the all-in?

Three things can happen now:

• 1. Player 3 folds (all chip stacks remain the same).
• 2. Player 3 calls and wins (player 3 now has 4,000 chips, player 2 is out).
• 3. Player 3 calls and loses (player 2 now has 4,000 chips, player 3 is out).

For each of these potential chip constellations we can calculate the ICM expectation:

ICM expectations after fold and ICM expectations after call

The table shows, if player 3 calls and wins, his 4,000 chips have an expected value of $36.44. But if he calls and loses, he has no more chips and his expected value for the tournament is $0.

Since player 3 can estimate how often he wins the showdown (60 percent), you can simply calculate his expected value for a call:

On average, a call is worth $21.86. If Player 3 folds, however, his chips have an expected value of $24.33 – around $2.47 more.

This means: in this specific example situation, the ICM advises a fold although the player has on average a much better hand than his opponent.

Why is a fold better in this situation when the player is the clear favourite in the hand?

Simply put: the short stack, player 4, is to blame. For player 3, it is much more profitable to wait for him to bust, rather than endangering all his chips. If player 3 simply waits, he will most likely at least secure the prize money for third place, but if player 3 gets involved in an all-in, there is a very realistic chance that he will be eliminated without a payout.

The ICM takes this into account and advises him to fold.

Quick ICM Poker tips

Now you can’t just do such ICM calculations at the table, but there are numerous ICM trainers on the net which can help you play through such scenarios using example situations. Here are a few tips on how to play correctly according to ICM:

• Call tighter: The ICM always advises that you should call tighter in tournaments than in cash games.
• More chips, less value: According to ICM, the first chip you have is always the most valuable. Doubling the stack is always less than twice as valuable.
• Impact before the bubble: The ICM has the strongest impact just before the bubble and around prize money jumps in the tournament.
• Avoid narrow All-Ins: According to the ICM, you should avoid narrow All-Ins when there are players with fewer chips in the tournament.
• Caution with medium sized stacks: Coinflips or All-Ins where you are only a narrow favorite should be avoided with a medium sized stack before or at bubble and you should prefer to fold.
• Play reckless as the big stack: Players with large stacks should very often threaten players with medium stacks with All-Ins, because according to ICM they can only call with very few hands.
• Threaten tight players: If the opponents have an understanding of ICM (or generally play very tightly), you should threaten them with All-Ins particularly frequently.
• Leave loose players alone: If the opponents do not have an understanding of ICM (or call very loose in general), you should also play much tighter yourself.

The Limits of ICM in Poker

The Independent Chip Model is currently the best known method for accurately measuring the value of chips in poker tournaments. But ICM is also not free of disadvantages. Some of these are:

• No position: The ICM does not consider a player’s position (a 4 big blind stack on the button is generally worth much more than a 4 big blind stack in first position).
• No skill: The ICM does not consider the players’ skills.
• No future: The ICM does not take into account possible future developments (sometimes it is better to avoid a narrowly profitable situation, since better ones might open up later).

Very often ICM is used when calculating deals in tournaments, because it is the fairest model to give the stacks of the players a concrete value. So if you ever get into the situation of wanting to negotiate a deal in a tournament, an ICM calculator is recommended.

Relevant Resources

• Advanced ICM Calculator
• Introduction to ICM Poker (Upswing Poker)
• Mathematics of Poker (Amazon)
• Ben Sulsky, Quick ICM Intro (Run It Once Video)

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Cheating in poker is any behavior outside the rules that is intended to give an unfair advantage to one or more players.

Types of cheating[edit]

Cheating can be done many ways, including collusion, sleight-of-hand (such as bottom dealing or stacking the deck), or the use of physical objects such as marked cards or holdout devices or using AI and high-tech electromechanical devices like shuffling machines to manipulate the deck.

Cheating occurs in both friendly games and casinos. Cheats may operate alone, or may operate in teams or small groups.

Following is a list of terms used to categorize specific card cheats:

• card mechanic: A card cheat who specializes in sleight-of-hand and manipulation of cards, a card sharp.
• base dealer: Also called a bottom dealer, or a second dealer, this relies on two related methods that manipulate the dealing of cards.
• deadlock deck: Use of computer and AI to manipulate the game either with manipulation of RNG in online games by hacking or use of electromechanical devices like shuffling machines to manipulate the deck.
• paper player: A card cheat that exploits the use of marked cards.
• hand mucker: A card cheat that specializes in switching cards.
• machine player: A card cheat that uses mechanical holdouts.
• double deal: dealing a player two or more cards during one round of a deal.

Minimal-skill methods[edit]

The easiest and most common types of cheating require no skill of manipulation, but rather merely the nerve. Such methods include shorting the pot, avoiding house fees, and peeking at other players' cards. However, it is very difficult to prove because when confronted, at least the first time, the cheat often calls the cheating an honest mistake.

One minimal-skill method that occurs in non-casino and casino games happens when a player who has folded appoints themselves the tender of the pot, stacking chips, counting them, and delivering them to the winning player. Check-chopping is when such a 'helpful' player palms a chip. Odorless adhesive can be used for this purpose.

Another minimal-skill method is going south (also known as 'ratholing'), where a player covertly removes a portion of their chips from play while remaining in the game, normally in order to preserve the winnings as profit, or prevent a major loss in 'big bet' games.

Skilled methods[edit]

A cheat may hand-muck a card or more than one card. When a cheat is 'mucking' the cheat is cleverly hiding cards in their hand, to later switch their hand for. This may also be done with a confederate.

A skilled cheat can deal the second card, the bottom card, the second from bottom card, and the middle card. The idea is to cull, or to find the cards one needs, place them at the bottom, top, or any other place the cheat wants, then false deal them to oneself or one's confederate.

One sign of false dealing could be when a dealer grips the deck with the index finger in front of it or their pinky and pointing finger on both short sides of the deck while the other fingers support the deck while the cards are being beveled slightly. This is referred to as the 'Mechanic's Grip'. It not only allows better control of the cards, but provides cover by showing the back of the top card, and without moving the hand holding the deck.

A cheat can place certain cards in a position favorable to the card cheat. This is called 'Stacking'. Stacking is more often done than 'False dealing' because it doesn't look suspicious. There are a couple of techniques for 'Stacking' cards. The most famous are: Riffle Stacking and Overhand Stacking. By Riffle Stacking the cheat stacks the card(s) while doing a Riffle shuffle. This form of stacking is the most difficult to master and the most respected under the card sharps and magicians. The Overhand Stacking method takes little practice, and is more likely to be done in a situation with a cheat. The cheat does a (what looks like) normal Overhand Shuffle. But while the cheat is shuffling they keep track of the cards they want to stack, and with a little practice they can manage to put the exact number of cards in between the cards they want to stack to make the next round of dealing favorable for the cheat.

Even if a cheat deals themselves a powerful hand, they may not win much money if every other player has nothing, so often the cheat will stack two hands, with one player receiving a strong hand and the cheater getting an even stronger one. This is called a 'double duke'.

A slight advantage for a cheat can be to know what cards are placed both on the top of the deck as well as the bottom card, so that information can then later be used to bottom deal or second deal themselves that card. The looking at the top or bottom card without the other players knowing or seeing it is called 'Glimpsing' or 'Peeking'. There are a lot of methods for reaching the same goal. A method that is used most is called the 'Shiner'. A Shiner is a reflective object (such as coffee, a lighter, a blade etc.) that is placed under the deck, so when the cheat is looking into the shiner the bottom card is exposed, and every card that is dealt over the shiner can easily be peeked by looking in the shiner.

One method of cheating that involves both great risk and great potential pay-off is the cold deck—so called because it has not been 'warmed up' by play (and thus randomised). Such decks are usually pre-stacked, and are introduced either at the deal, after the real deck has been shuffled, or before the deal, where a card sharp will make a false shuffle using sleight of hand. The latter method may require collusion or a pass if the style of play or house rules call for a cut. The skill lies both in convincing other players that the shuffle is legitimate and in ensuring that other players receive hands that are good enough to entice them into play, but not too good to arouse suspicion.

Marked cards[edit]

Marked cards are printed or altered so that the cheater can know the value of specific cards while only looking at the back. Ways of marking are too numerous to mention, but there are certain broad types. A common way of marking cards involves marks on a round design on the card so as to be read like a clock (an ace is marked at one o'clock, and so on until the king, which is not marked). Shading a card by putting it in the sun or scratching the surface with a razor are ways to mark an already printed deck.

Juice and 'daub' are two kinds of substances that can be used to mark cards in a subtle way so as to avoid detection, when done properly. While a 'juice' deck is premarked and introduced into play by the cheater, 'daub' is applied during play to any deck. Once trained, cheaters can read the cards from across the table.

Decks can be marked while playing using fingernails, poker chips or by bending or crimping the cards in a position that the cheat can read from across the table. The practice of burning the top card, or cards, is to prevent a cheat from knowing that top card and dealing 'seconds' to either give a confederate a card that helps their hand or an opponent a card that hurts theirs.

Collusion[edit]

Collusion is two or more players acting with a secret, common strategy.^[1] Some common forms of collusion are: soft play, that is, failing to bet or raise in a situation that would normally merit it, to avoid costing one's partner or friend money; whipsawing, where partners raise and re-raise each other to trap players in between; dumping, where a cheater will deliberately lose to a partner; and signalling, or trading information between partners via signals of some sort, like arranging their chips in a certain manner.

In a poker tournament, when one player is all in and two other players are active in the pot, it is common for the two players with chips left to 'check it down', or check on each round of betting through the end of the hand. Unless they explicitly communicate an agreement about checking it down, this is not collusion.^[2]

Online specific[edit]

Online play has allowed for new methods of cheating while other methods based on physical objects such as cards or chips are impossible.

One new form of cheating is the use of bots. These are programs that play instead of a real human. Though their accuracy and their ability to win are disputed, their use normally violates the rules of online cardrooms, so using them is, by definition, cheating.^[3][4]

Collusion in online poker is relatively easy and much more difficult to immediately spot if executed well. Cheaters can engage in telephone calls or instant messaging, discussing their cards, since nobody can see them. Sometimes one person may be using two or more computers to play multiple hands at the same table under different aliases (since many broadband plans offer customers multiple IP addresses, this can conveniently and cheaply be done without the likelihood of immediate detection). Such tactics can give cheaters an advantage that is difficult to work against. However, online poker cardrooms keep records of every hand played, and collusion can often be detected by finding any of several detectable patterns (such as folding good hands to a small bet, as it is known that another player has a better hand). Users who frequently sit at the same tables will be flagged by poker rooms and their play will be closely monitored. Often, such users will be warned they have been flagged, in an effort to deter collusion.

Another online method of cheating is 'multiaccounting', where a player will register several accounts to their name (or, perhaps more commonly, to non-poker-playing friends and family members). This might be done to help enable the collusion previously mentioned, or perhaps to simply enable a well-known player to play incognito. However, another common motive for multi-accounting is to facilitate chip dumping and other methods of equity maximization in online tournaments. A major difference between cash games and tournaments is that tournament winnings tend to be much less consistent over the short to medium term. Because tournaments tend to pay prize money only to the top ten percent of entrants on average and tend to pay the majority of prize money to a very small number of top finishers, in tournament play even the best players are prone to relatively long streaks of overall net losses (or even no winnings at all) between sizable wins. Therefore, for high-stakes players who specialize in tournament play, multi-accounting is one possible means to allow a player to play more entries in major tournaments than they would otherwise be able to, potentially multiplying the player's earnings and, just as importantly, making earnings more consistent over a shorter period of time. However, the risk is that a large win by hitherto unknown 'player' may attract scrutiny from the host (and other players), especially if the winner has no known previous poker experience but does have clear ties to a better-known player. In addition, some sites now offer multi-table tournaments where the same player can enter multiple times under their own name, so as to reduce the incentive to multi-account.

Another concern is datamining. This is the systematic collection of hand histories, enough of which can be used to profile opponents using specially designed software. Two or more players may agree to share their individual hand histories amongst themselves; alternatively some websites offer large quantities of previously-played hands (even millions) for a fee. Using software to analyze one's own histories is generally accepted, however acquiring histories of hands in which a player did not participate violates the rules of most cardrooms.

Poker software, like all software, cannot be assumed to be reliable. It is always possible that a person is exploiting the software to win money from victims. The software may even contain a backdoor which allows a person, perhaps an employee, to view cards. Absolute Poker was engaged in such a scandal along with site consultant and notable poker player Russ Hamilton. As of 2007, Ultimate Bet faces a lawsuit with allegations of employees exploiting the software.^[5] The user agreement of the two online poker sites owned by Tokwiro Enterprises, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, state they reserve the right to cancel an account if a player plays 'in a professional sense' (and not for personal entertainment only).^[6][7] However, this is not a standard prohibition. For example, it is not in the end-user agreements of the three largest online cardrooms: PokerStars, PartyPoker, and Full Tilt Poker.

Angle shooting[edit]

Angle shooting is engaging in actions that may technically be within the scope of the rules of the game, but that are considered unethical or unfair to exploit or take advantage of another player. For example, an angle shooter might motion as if they were folding their hand to induce other players to fold theirs out of turn.

One form of angle shooting which is exclusive to online poker is to abuse the disconnect protection (DP) rules most sites have in place. DP is a rule exclusive to online poker whereby if a player is disconnected from the site in the middle of the hand their hand is played out as if they were all-in without the player actually having to put any more money in the pot. The online poker rooms that offer DP usually have specific tables set aside for this so that all players at the table are aware that the special DP rules will apply.^[8]

How this is used by angle shooters is if a player is in a hand that they are unsure if they have the best cards and don't want to invest any more money to find out. They can unplug their internet connection and then wait for the hand to play itself out. On a DP table the remaining cards in the hand would be dealt and the pot would be awarded to the player with the best cards. If there were multiple opponents in the hand then they would be eligible for a side pot.^{[citation needed]}

Famous poker cheats[edit]

• Soapy Smith (1860-1898)

Cheating in poker in popular culture[edit]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^T. Hayes, 'Collusion Strategy and Analysis for Texas Hold'em', 2017
2. ^Is 'checking it down' in a tournament implicit collusion?Archived May 10, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
3. ^PokerStars.com: End User License Agreement
4. ^PartyPoker.com: PartyGaming’s Unfair Advantage PolicyArchived 2007-10-16 at the Wayback Machine
5. ^Online poker cheating blamed on employee, by Mike Brunker, at NBC News; published October 19, 2007; retrieved November 25, 2018
6. ^AbsolutePoker: End-User License AgreementArchived October 18, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
7. ^Ultimatebet.com: End User License AgreementArchived October 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
8. ^Bill Rini: The Definitive Guide to Online Poker Cheating

External links[edit]

• Poker Cheating by Arnold Snyder