tournament icm

When playing a poker tournament, the value of chips does not directly correlate to the number of chips accumulated. A player could sneak into 3rd place with one chip left and be guaranteed a prize, whereas a player who blows a big stack on the bubble leaves empty handed. This means that there are some complicated formulas for calculating the value of your chips (the ICM independent chip model) and whether certain moves like going all in or calling all in are profitable in the long run, based on your stack size, the stack sizes of your opponents, the blinds etc.  There are tools that will calculate your expected value for an action (EV) . Take a look at sngwiz.com and sngegt.com. Some of these tools may offer live play results which may break the terms of the site so check in advance before using such tools while playing however you can practice scenarios offline to get an idea of the basics of the ICM (independent chip model)  EV expected value concepts. In general, when playing a tournament, you are more concerned about making it to the final table and into the money more so than you are about accumulating chips. Although accumulating chips will be the way to make it into the money, sometimes you can pass up some action that you might otherwise readily take when in a cash game, but in a tournament you would be better off laying low and letting your opponents duke it out and get eliminated thereby giving you positive EV . All this comes with experience and study. It is not trivial to master but if you take the time to learn it will give that that edge to become a winning player rather than one that repeatedly deposits again and again.