Everything you have learned so far holds in both. The hand rankings, the positions, the ranges, the price of a call — one thing changes all the same, and it is exactly what chapter 5 worked out.
You sit down, buy in, play — and leave whenever you like. A chip is worth exactly what it says. Get up from the table and your stack goes with you to the cashier.
That has a consequence which is easy to miss: every hand stands on its own. Whether you are still at the table afterwards changes nothing about the value of what you just won. The calculation from chapter 5 holds here unchanged — the price is the price.
Everyone pays the same and starts with the same stack. Play continues until one player has all the chips; anyone left with none is out and cannot buy back in.
Chips gone means out. Everything else follows from exactly that.
The prize money goes to the best finishes — not to whoever collected the most chips, but to whoever lasted longest.
Surviving is therefore worth something in itself. In a cash game it earns you nothing; in a tournament it is half the job.
That is the heart of it, and it can be shown in the smallest situation there is: two players left, the prize pool split.
| Your chips | What you get on average |
|---|---|
| half the timehalf won, half lost | 50 |
| all of themtournament won | 60 |
| nonesecond place pays too | 40 |
You double your chips — and get a fifth more money. From 50 to 60. In a cash game twice as many chips would have become twice as much money, every time.
And the other direction matters just as much: losing all your chips does not send you home with nothing — second place pays. Winning brings 10, losing costs 10, and both for the same 50 per cent of the chips.
That is the whole distortion, in one table. Everything beyond it — four players, uneven stacks, a bubble — is the same calculation with more rows.
This distortion has a name: ICM, the Independent Chip Model. It is the calculation that turns tournament chips into real money — nothing more.
And that answers the question this chapter closes on: why can a fold be right in a tournament that would be wrong in a cash game?
Because in both cases the call wins the same chips — but not the same money. Chapter 5 showed how to work out whether a call is worth it. In a tournament, one side of that calculation no longer holds what you win, but what it costs you when you lose — and that is greatest on the bubble.
These are exactly the decisions this programme trains. Not the cards, but the moment a good call turns into a bad one because a place is worth more money than a chip.
Six questions, one answer each. Two of them may look familiar — they have been in this lesson from the start.
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