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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kim, Juho
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00180
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author Kim, Juho
author_facet Kim, Juho
contents The independent chip model (ICM) forms a cornerstone of all modern poker tournament strategy. However, despite its prominence, the ICM's performance in the real world has not been sufficiently scrutinized, especially at a large scale. In this paper, we introduce our new dataset of poker tournaments, consisting of results of over ten thousand events. Then, using this dataset, we perform two experiments as part of a large-scale empirical validation of the ICM. First, we verify that the ICM performs more accurately than a baseline we propose. Second, we obtain empirical evidence of the ICM underestimating the performances of players with larger stacks while overestimating those who are short-stacked. Our contributions may be useful to future researchers developing new algorithms for estimating a player's value in poker tournaments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00180
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empirical Validation of the Independent Chip Model
Kim, Juho
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
The independent chip model (ICM) forms a cornerstone of all modern poker tournament strategy. However, despite its prominence, the ICM's performance in the real world has not been sufficiently scrutinized, especially at a large scale. In this paper, we introduce our new dataset of poker tournaments, consisting of results of over ten thousand events. Then, using this dataset, we perform two experiments as part of a large-scale empirical validation of the ICM. First, we verify that the ICM performs more accurately than a baseline we propose. Second, we obtain empirical evidence of the ICM underestimating the performances of players with larger stacks while overestimating those who are short-stacked. Our contributions may be useful to future researchers developing new algorithms for estimating a player's value in poker tournaments.
title Empirical Validation of the Independent Chip Model
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00180