ICM
Why a 60 Percent Chip Stack Is Worth 41 Percent of the Prize Pool
Three players are left and you have 60% of the chips. First pays half the prize pool, second 30% and third 20%. ICM says your stack is worth 41.06% of the pool. The other two have 25% and 15% of the chips and are worth 31.69% and 27.25%.
The gap between 60% of the chips and 41% of the money is called the ICM tax. The 50/30/20 payout is a real one. The 2025 WSOP Main Event paid $10 million for first, $6 million for second and $4 million for third, exactly that split of the $20 million left once three players remained. Sixty percent of the chips at that point was worth $8.21 million, not $12 million. Open this spot in the ICM calculator to change the stacks.
| Stack | Chip share | Share of the pool | Pool share per 1% of chips (average) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leader | 60% | 41.06% | 0.68% |
| Middle | 25% | 31.69% | 1.27% |
| Short | 15% | 27.25% | 1.82% |
The chip leader still wins 60% of the time
ICM doesn't assume the big stack plays worse. It gives every player a chance of finishing first equal to their share of the chips, so the 60% stack wins 60.0% of the time. It finishes second 30.6% of the time and third 9.4%. Weight those by the prizes and you get its 41.06%.
The ceiling is first place. A stack that won every time would be worth 50% of the pool, so on this payout no stack can be worth more than half, however many chips it has. The short stack has a floor instead: it can't finish worse than third, which pays 20%. It finishes third 57.5% of the time and wins 15.0%. Everything the leader loses against its chip share, the two shorter stacks gain. The ICM explainer works the same kind of example by hand, finishing order by finishing order.
Prize pool share by chip share and players left
Each cell is one stack's share of the money still to be paid when it holds the chip share on the left and the other players split the rest evenly. The prizes are from the 2025 Main Event final table, and the 6-left column uses the top six of them. The last row is first prize as a share of what's left. No stack in the column is worth that much.
| Chip share | 9 left | 6 left | 4 left | 3 left | 2 left |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10% | 10.5% | 13.5% | 18.6% | 24.6% | 40.0% |
| 20% | 15.1% | 18.1% | 23.1% | 28.7% | 42.5% |
| 30% | 18.6% | 21.7% | 26.8% | 32.2% | 45.0% |
| 40% | 21.5% | 24.7% | 30.0% | 35.4% | 47.5% |
| 50% | 23.8% | 27.3% | 32.8% | 38.3% | 50.0% |
| 60% | 25.9% | 29.6% | 35.4% | 41.0% | 52.5% |
| 70% | 27.7% | 31.6% | 37.6% | 43.5% | 55.0% |
| 80% | 29.4% | 33.4% | 39.7% | 45.8% | 57.5% |
| 90% | 30.9% | 35.1% | 41.7% | 47.9% | 60.0% |
| First prize | 32.2% | 36.6% | 43.5% | 50.0% | 62.5% |
With 3 or more left, each extra 10% of the chips adds less than the one before. With 9 left, going from 10% to 20% adds 4.6 points of the pool. Going from 70% to 80% adds 1.7. Heads-up the steps are all the same size. Across a row, the same chip share buys a bigger slice of what's left as players go out, because every prize left is a bigger slice of a smaller pool, the smallest one included. With two left, second place alone is 37.5% of what's left, and every stack is sure of at least that.
Four times the chips is worth about twice the money
With 9 left at the Main Event, $31.05 million was still to be paid, so an average stack was worth exactly a ninth of it: $3.45 million. A stack four times the average holds 44.4% of the chips and is worth $7 million, about two average stacks. Split by chips it would get $13.8 million.
| Stack (× average) | Chip share | ICM value | Ninth-place prizes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1× | 1.1% | $1.33M | 1.33 |
| 0.25× | 2.8% | $1.78M | 1.78 |
| 0.5× | 5.6% | $2.42M | 2.42 |
| 1× | 11.1% | $3.45M | 3.45 |
| 2× | 22.2% | $4.97M | 4.97 |
| 3× | 33.3% | $6.09M | 6.09 |
| 4× | 44.4% | $7.00M | 7.00 |
A quarter of the average stack has 2.8% of the chips and is still worth $1.78 million, 1.78 times the $1 million ninth place pays.
A real final table: the 2026 Main Event
Lucas Jumalon sat down at the 2026 final table with 194,000,000 of the 553,000,000 chips, 35.1%. Of the $30.25 million paid at the final table, ICM put his stack at $6.19 million, or 20.5%. Han Feng had 4.5% of the chips and 7.6% of the money, and Evagoras Evagorou had 4.1% and 7.2%. Jumalon held the chip lead for every hand of the final table and won $10 million.
How the other stacks are split barely matters
Keep the leader at 60% three-handed and move the other 40% around. Its share of the pool moves by less than a point:
- 60 / 20 / 20: the leader is worth 41.00%, the second stack 29.50%
- 60 / 25 / 15: the leader is worth 41.06%, the second stack 31.69%
- 60 / 30 / 10: the leader is worth 41.24%, the second stack 33.83%
- 60 / 35 / 5: the leader is worth 41.55%, the second stack 35.93%
- 60 / 39 / 1: the leader is worth 41.90%, the second stack 37.59%
The leader's number depends mostly on its own chips and the payouts. The second stack's depends a lot on who is below it. So on 50/30/20, a 60% stack is worth between 41.0% and 42.0% of the pool, whatever the other two hold. BlackRain79's ICM guide gets 41.2% for 60/30/10, which matches. Deuces Cracked's ICM calculator page says a 60% stack at a three-player final table “might have 52-55%, depending on the payout structure.” It doesn't say which payout. On 50/30/20 a 60% stack can't get near that. It takes a much steeper payout: on 80/15/5 the same 60/25/15 stacks give the leader 53.06%, and if only two places are paid, first has to get 73% to 83% of the pool.
Heads-up, the gap shrinks
With two players left, ICM is a straight line: second prize plus your share of the chips times the gap to first. At the Main Event that was $6 million plus 60% of $4 million, so 60% of the chips was worth $8.4 million, 52.5% of the $16 million left. The only payout where chips and money match for every stack is winner-take-all.
Chips you win are worth less than chips you lose
Three-handed on 50/30/20 with stacks of 30%, 35% and 35%, the short stack is worth 32.2%. Win an all-in against a 35% stack and it has 60% of the chips, worth 41.5%. Lose and it is out in third with 20.0%. The call needs 56.8% to break even, not 50%. The bubble factor calculator gives that number for any spot, and the bubble factor chart explains it.
Chip chop or ICM deal
The two standard ways to split a final table are a chip chop, which pays each player their share of the chips, and an ICM deal. Three-handed at 60/25/15, the chip chop hands the leader 60% of the pool and ICM hands it 41.06%. Nineteen points of the prize pool ride on which one the table agrees to.
Does ICM sell chip leaders short?
A little. ICM knows nothing about who is the better player or how big the blinds are. It sees the stacks and the payouts and nothing else. A 2025 paper at the IEEE Conference on Games built a dataset of more than ten thousand WSOP.com and PokerNews events and checked ICM against 2,500 end-of-day chip counts from it. ICM predicted payouts better than a simple ranking of the stacks did. But at tables of ten or fewer, the biggest quarter of stacks finished about half a point of the prize pool better than ICM said, and the smallest quarter about 0.4 points worse.
To price your own final table, put the stacks and payouts in the ICM calculator. Part ten of the course, stack sizes and ICM, plays the big-stack spots as hands, and the lesson on whether to make a deal puts a three-handed deal offer in front of you.