ICM trainer

Near the money the right play depends on the payouts, not only on your cards. The ICM trainer gives you short-stack spots from bubbles, final tables and satellites, asks you to jam, call or fold, and then shows why in numbers: the price of the call, the bubble factor, the equity you need and the risk premium.

Open the ICM trainer → Free for now, runs in your browser.

What you practise

Push/fold decisions with a payout ladder: go all-in or fold when you are first in, and call or fold when someone has gone all-in. The trainer deals a random table with up to nine stacks and a hand in a position, and you choose. Your own stack goes up to 10 big blinds, where the decision really is jam or fold; the opponent who shoves can have up to 14.

• Payout structures: final table with 9, 8 or 6 players, a bubble with three of four paid, heads-up, or your own payouts for 2 to 9 players.
• Ante on or off (1 big blind in total, shared equally by all players), counted as dead money in the pot.
• Table code: the same code gives the same table and stacks, so you can repeat or share a spot.
• ICM pressure panel: bubble factor, required equity in ICM and in chips, risk premium, and what your stack is worth if you fold, win or lose.

What you see after each answer

The explanation is built from the numbers of the spot, not from rules of thumb:

• the price of the call in chips and the price of a chip in prize pool terms;
• the bubble factor, the required equity and how many points ICM adds to the chip EV requirement;
• who can call you, how wide their calling range is, and how often everybody folds;
• a breakdown of every course of the all-in with its probability and value;
• the range boundary: the weakest hands that still go all-in and the best hands that fold;
• a note on the limits of the model, and a short glossary.

A spot from the trainer, worked by hand

Nine players are left, the payouts are 28/19/13/10/8/7/6/5/4%, the blinds are 50/100 with a 12.5 ante, and 262.5 chips are in the middle. You have 1600 and the 3000 stack goes all-in. In chips you need 46.2% equity. Under ICM you need 63.9%: the risk premium is 17.7 points and the bubble factor is 1.77. Your stack is worth 12.1% of the prize pool after a fold, 16.7% after a win and 4.0% after a loss.

This is the kind of arithmetic the trainer does for every spot. You can check this one yourself: open it in the ICM calculator.

Calculator and ranges inside the trainer

• Calculator: enter stacks, payouts, posts, the hero and the opponent, and get the required equity, bubble factor and risk premium. It runs in your browser and sends nothing to a server. The same maths is on the web as the free ICM calculator and the bubble factor calculator.
• Ranges and range drawing: browse the ICM range for a spot, or paint your own range and see its average EV loss per hand in percent of the prize pool.
• Stats: see which areas cost you the most and train the weakest one.
• ICM training: a separate mode that plays the full line of a hand at a nine-player final table, for stacks deeper than the push/fold cap.

What it is, and what it is not

The numbers are an approximation from our own ICM model, not a fixed rule, and ICM itself is a simplification: it knows nothing about skill, future blinds or bounties. Read when ICM misleads you for the numbers, and the limits of the solution book. The trainer is made for tournament players at micro, low and mid stakes (micro to mid stakes buy-ins). It is for adults only (18+).