Chopping a Survivor
Survivor, 3 places pay $4000, 4th pays $2400, 6 players left, blinds 3K/6K/6K, 25 minute levels. Chip leader has about 300K chips, I have about 270K chips, others are close and average about 83K chips. Someone suggest giving chip leader $2K in a chop. I offer to take $3600 in a chop. We agree to give us big stacks $3600 and the others take $1800 each. I was willing to go to $3400, but they took $3600. Was trying to get a favorable chop, but not to cheat them.
The shorter stacks were maybe all amateurs and didn’t want to get nothing. Chip leader said to me that we save time, as it could take another 2 hours, implying it was a bad deal for us. I thought it was a favorable chop for the big stacks, as anything could happen, and there was danger one of us could get the $2400 if not $0. The big stacks could put pressure on, but also could be pressured as we didn’t want to risk our leads.
I ran the ICM values later, and they were $3520 for the chip leader and $3430 for me. I probably had some skill advantage, but thought it was a somewhat favorable chop. In the future, I think I will plug it into an ICM calculator. My intuition was pretty close to the calculator though. They could really have worked out an exact ICM chop, but I guess didn’t know how to do it.
4 Replies
Well done!
Everywhere I play can do ICM chops for us and when they tell us the numbers we typically agree (assuming everyone wants to chop). But I will never agree if my take is less than what it should be (which has happened once and I declined to do the chop).
As with you though there are times where the remaining players come up with a chop that is favorable for me and I will always take that. It has happened three times when I was in third (out of three players left) and one of those times the chip leader said we should just chop it evenly (he knew I had a read on him). It has also happened a few other times (once when there were 17 players left at Mohegan Sun and we evenly chopped when I was in last place!).
And of course there were two times where I suggested a 3 way deal when i was chip leader that slightly favored the other players. Not sure why i did it, but the last one was in Las Vegas and it was my last night and I had a very early flight the next morning...
It worked out well. Someone said the chip leader should get the full amount, which didn't make sense, so I offered to take a little less. Sort of intended to start high to negotiate, but they took it. I should probably run the values on software at the time, but had a pretty good idea what they were. Don't usually look to chop in a regular tournament, but wanted to eliminate risk here. Maybe the place would show chop values for a regular tournament. Haven't played one their recently. The shorter stacks obviously wanted to eliminate the real risk of getting nothing.
Congratulations. Doing better than ICM in a negotiation is a win even if you didn’t know it at the time.
Very good deal!
