Tournament chips are not money. Doubling your stack does not double your equity, because the prize pool is fixed and finishing positions pay differently.
ICM estimates the cash value of a stack from the payout structure and the chip counts at the table. Its practical effect is to make chips you could lose worth more than chips you could win, which is why correct tournament play near a pay jump is far tighter than the raw pot odds suggest.
The pressure peaks on the bubble. A call that is comfortably profitable in chip terms can be clearly losing in ICM terms, and the players who understand that are the ones quietly accumulating while everyone else folds.
Related terms in tournaments
- Bubble — The point at which the next player eliminated finishes just outside the money.
- Chop — An agreement among remaining players to split the prize pool rather than play it out.
- Guarantee — A minimum prize pool the organiser commits to regardless of entries.
- Overlay — The shortfall an organiser covers when entries do not reach the guarantee.
- Freeroll — A tournament with no entry fee, or a situation where you cannot lose but might win.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.