Calculate fair tournament chops using the Independent Chip Model.
Compare ICM payouts against chip-proportional splits and run any blended deal in between.
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| Player | Chips | Chip-chop | ICM | Blended | Δ |
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The Independent Chip Model is a mathematical formula that converts tournament chip stacks into real-money equity. Unlike a cash game where every chip is worth its face value, tournament chips are not directly redeemable — your stack determines your probability of finishing in each paid position, and that probability translates into expected dollar value.
ICM is the standard tool for negotiating final-table deals because it accounts for the diminishing value of additional chips. Doubling your stack does not double your $EV when there is a flat top-three payout — ICM captures that nuance, while a simple chip-proportional split does not.
Use ICM whenever a final table or money bubble considers a deal. ICM gives the chip leader a fair share of the remaining prize pool while protecting the short stack from being undervalued. Most professional tournament players treat ICM as the floor — if a deal pays you less than ICM, you should keep playing or push back.
Casual home games sometimes use chip-chop because the math is simpler, but it systematically overpays the chip leader and underpays short stacks. The blend slider above lets you visualize how the deal shifts as you move from pure chip-chop to pure ICM.
We use the standard Malmuth-Harville algorithm: each player's probability of finishing first equals their share of total chips. We then compute conditional probabilities for second place, third place, and so on by recursively removing the assumed winner and recalculating. Multiplying these probabilities by the payout for each place yields the ICM equity for every player.
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ICM treats every player as having equal skill and ignores ICM-pressure dynamics like risk aversion. In practice, the chip leader often has a real-world advantage that pure ICM does not capture, so leaders sometimes negotiate slightly above ICM. Conversely, a recreational short stack might accept slightly less than ICM in exchange for guaranteed money. The blend slider helps you explore the negotiation space.
Chip-chop divides the remaining prize pool in proportion to chip stacks. This systematically overpays the chip leader because it ignores the fact that the prize pool has a fixed distribution — additional chips beyond the leader's position do not earn additional payout. ICM corrects for this by computing the expected dollar value of each stack given the actual prize structure.
Yes — try our free tournament payout calculator for prize pool and payout structure modeling.