Review of Poker DealMaker ICM

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The iPhone offers a lot of opportunities for poker-related applications, and we’re now starting to see the first wave of niche products designed as iPhone apps and aimed at the poker market. In this article, we’ll be reviewing one of those apps – a tournament deal making calculator.

Overview
Poker DealMaker ICM (PDM) is a simple iPhone application that acts as a calculator which allows you to work out chops at the final table of a tournament. Chops are fairly common events in live poker, especially at smaller casinos or home games where the structures result in very high blind levels relative to stacks at the final table. Rather than gamble, players often agree to flatten out the prize money. However, one of the problems is that it can be difficult to get several people to agree on how the money should be distributed. That’s where PDM comes in.

Look
Simple and to the point – not unattractive, but the focus isn’t on the design as much as it’s on entering and manipulating data and displaying the results.

Unique pros / cons
Easy to use, and flexible, which are the two things you want out of a tool like this. You can adjust player payouts individually if someone wants to shift the deal a bit one way or the other; you can save proposed deals and return to them after reviewing other options, and entering all of the data is a snap.

The calculator relies on an ICM model, which assigns a value to each stack based on the projected value of that stack from an EV perspective, as opposed to a straight chip-chop model that generally undervalues shorter stacks. It should be noted that some players criticize ICM for giving a little too much weight to short stacks. However, it’s generally accepted that ICM is a reasonable model for composing a deal, small flaws aside.

Bottom Line
If you play live tournaments regularly, this is a handy tool – and, at $1.99, it really doesn’t have to be used too often to pay for itself. Don’t expect to bust it out every day, but be prepared to be thankful when you find yourself discussing a chop and you have the tool to know whether or not you’re being offered a fair deal.

Learn more about PDM ICM

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