You've had a long, grueling tournament session and managed to make it to the final table. The time on the clock says it all, and it's time for you to hit the sack. But what about all the hard work you had devoted to making it this far. Its situations like these when Deal Making becomes an integral and convenient way to divide up the remaining prize pool at the final table of a tournament.
Our Deal Making option, also known as the Independent Chip Model (ICM), is available after seat selection has been completed before the final table of a tournament begins. When all players agree to make a deal, the game will momentarily stop to show the prize amount distributed per the chip stacks in each player's possession. At that moment, the prize pool is credited immediately, and regular play will resume determining the final ranking for Tournament Leaderboard Point (TLP) purposes.
ICM is a distribution method based on the current chip count of players regardless of external factors such as poker skills, blinds, bubble, and more. So one may ask how it is different from the alternative Chip Chop method? There are situations when the chip leader receives more than the first place prize amount when a Chip Chop method is applied. In these cases, other players will also receive prize amounts less than the expected prize payout. Therefore, many cases may arise where players will not agree to Deal Making. Unlike the Chip Chop method, the ICM method considers more factors and ensures a fairer distribution of the prize pool.
For the sake of example, let's say the first and second place prize amount is $100 and $50 respectively, but the status of chips is 1,000 and 1. In this situation, even though a player may have 1,000 times more in terms of chips, the player will only be awarded a prize amount that is two times greater. Therefore, distributing the prize based solely on the chip count is unreasonable.
When applying ICM using the details in the example above, the prize will be distributed 99.95 and 50.05 respectively. When using ICM to calculate the prize payout, there is a specific amount of chips based on N players, and when players randomly go all-in (each all-in winning rate is 50:50), the odds of each player finishing from 1st to Nth place is determined to come up with EV.
The formula used to calculate EV is as follows:
ICM EV$ = ProbabilityFinish1st * FirstPrize$ + ProbabilityFinish2nd * SecondPrize$ + … + ProbabilityFinishNth * NthPrize$
Once the deal is finalized, it's entirely up to you to finish the tournament for ranking purposes on the Tournament Leaderboard. Or if that is not one of your priorities, you can exit the client knowing that you have already received your settled end of the prize. Make it or break it, deal-making is a great tool for convenience. And this has been quite apparent recently, as many of our tournaments including our Daily Main Event $88 ended through multiple continuous deals.
