By Tony Guerrera

Tournaments generally finish in one of two ways: 1.) one person has all the chips (or when N players remain in the case of a satellite paying the same prize to N players) or 2.) the remaining players in a tournament make a deal in which they chop up the remaining prizepool in a manner acceptable to everyone. All my tournament articles here on Poker Helper have addressed playing dynamics relating to condition #1.

However, it’s inevitable that at some point in your tournament playing experience, you will be offered a deal. When you’re offered a deal, you’d obviously like some way of judging its fairness. Additionally, by becoming acquainted with the theory of tournament deal making, you may identify opportunities to lure your opponents into deals that are beneficial to you.

The Mechanics of Fair Deal Making

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many more times…your goal when playing poker is to optimize your monetary EV (expectation value), which is the amount of money you expect to make on average in the long run. In a tournament consisting of N players (including yourself), your monetary EV is equal to the following:

P(1st)(Payout for 1st) + P(2nd)(Payout for 2nd) +… + P(nth)(Payout for nth)

A fair deal for you is one in which you receive your monetary EV. This brings us to the first aspect of tournament deal making. Basic tournament deal making is all about assessing your monetary EV. If you and your opponents are of equal skill (i.e. implementing the same playing strategy), then you need to calculate your monetary EV as a function of the relative stacks in the tournament. A few schemes for this exist, but the most accurate one is independent chip modeling (ICM), which I’ve outlined in a series of articles here on Poker Helper.

Of course, it’ll be a rare occurrence that you’ll be at a table in which everyone is implementing the same exact strategy. What if you’re more skilled than your opponents? Well, in that case, your monetary EV will be higher than that predicted by ICM. Meanwhile, if you’re less skilled than your opponents–remember that honest self-introspection is essential for improving your game–then your true monetary EV will be lower than that given by ICM. Unfortunately, quantifying the impact your skill will have on your monetary EV is very difficult…if not impossible. The best you can do is make some type of impromptu adjustment on the fly during the deal-making process.

Exploitative Deal-Making

With the mechanics of fair deal-making in place, we can now proceed to the next level. Playing poker is all about knowing your opponents and taking advantage of holes that they leave open for you. Even though no cards fly in the air when you’re making a tournament deal, deal making is a huge part of poker if you play tournaments. By knowing your opponents and understanding the dynamics of deal making, you can put yourself in a position to make deals that leave you with sums of money greater than your monetary EV. Below are a few considerations usually at play when a deal is being stuck.

Look For People Looking To Minimize Their Variance: Players looking to minimize their variance will usually yield part of their monetary equity in order to lock in a big win. Suppose you’re in a tournament that’s down to 5 players. Player A has 15 big blinds, Player B has 15 big blinds, Player C has 40 big blinds, Player D has 15 big blinds, and you have 25 big blinds. First place pays $50,000, second place pays $30,000, third place pays $20,000, fourth place pays $15,000, and fifth place pays $10,000. Player C is a decent chip leader. According to ICM calculations, Player C’s monetary EV is about $32,654.74. Players in C’s position who are looking to minimize their variance may take second place money, which is $30,000, or they may even be willing to take slightly less. To convince them of such, just state that there’s a good chance that action will be evenly stacked when it’s down to three-handed. Whether or not this is the actual case doesn’t matter…just say what needs to be said to sway the deal making process in your favor!

Look For People Who Overestimate Their Skill and/or the Value of Their Big Stack: Let’s still consider the tournament situation outlined above. Some players in C’s shoes may grossly overestimate their equity and may not take anything less than $37,500 or $40,000. If that’s the case, there’s not much you can do. You can try to convince him that the chips will most likely be evenly distributed when action is three-handed, but unlike our risk minimizing Player C above, this Player C will not buy into such statements. The only way you can get a favorable deal at a table like this will be to convince the other stacks to unknowingly take the worst of it.

Look For Shortstacks Who Underestimate the Value Of Their Stacks: Each of the 15BB stacks in our hypothetical tournament has a monetary EV of $21,771.36. This is slightly better than 3rd place money. If you can convince each of the 15BB stacks to take something around $17,500, you are adding almost $9,000 to be distributed between yourself and Player C.

Keep The Position of the Blinds in Mind: For this concept, let’s consider a different tournament. The payout is the same, but going clockwise around the table, Player A has 4 big blinds, Player B has 4 big blinds, you have 6 big blinds (let’s say you’re Player C), and the other two players (players D and E) have 20 big blinds each. You are the button. If you were to take a deal right now, you probably wouldn’t be able to get much more than Players A and B given the skewed state of the stacks (actually, given the skewed state of the stacks, it might be tough for you to get a fair deal anyway unless both the big stacks are risk averse, but anyway…). However, if you play a few hands, Players A and B will be forced to take action because of the blinds. As a result, there’s a decent chance that one of them will be eliminated, meaning that you can enter deal-making with four players instead of five players, meaning that you’ll be able to make a deal in which you make more money.

Deal making in tournament poker is complicated. The considerations outlined here are a good introduction but are by no means exhaustive. The main idea is that being good at negotiations can substantially increase your returns, so don’t take the deal making process for granted…think of yourself as Donald Trump closing a huge real estate deal. May all your deals exceed your monetary EV!

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker by the Numbers

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