Poker Writer
Former poker player and now poker mentor Derek Wolters released a report detailing what he calls “ICM buying” late in poker tournaments, though “deep staking” might be a more apt description of the concept. It is similar to the practice of buying part of a player’s action before the tournament, but done in the late stages of a large-field event. ICM, or Independent Chip Model, is the mathematical system Wolters uses to determine a fair price to buy at once the event is already underway.
Wolters’ report was explicitly about the WSOP Main Event, where he aimed to buy equity from players still in the tournament from Day 5 onwards, including at the final table. Because player equities are high at those late stages, he raised $1 million in capital from other investors to make substantial offers.
Although he wasn’t able to buy as much action as he wanted, Wolters concluded that the concept was sound in principle.
Outside of his specific example, his methods raise questions about whether this type of staking could catch on in tournament poker moving forward.
How Buying Action Works
Buying and swapping “action” between tournament players is a common practice. The traditional system involves a player declaring that they want to sell a certain percentage of their potential winnings before a tournament begins. An investor pays a percentage of the player’s buy-in (plus a markup, often) and receives the same percentage of any money the player wins.
For instance, a player selling 10% of their Main Event action with no markup would collect $1,000 from an investor. If the player proceeded to win $50,000, then the investor would receive $5,000. If the player won the Main Event for $10 million, the buyer would get $1 million.
Many regular tournament players do this, with high-rollers often selling 50% or more. Selling to friends is common, but there are also professional backers who make a living funding and managing their “horses.”
The upside for sellers is to mitigate tournament variance and play in events that might otherwise be outside their bankroll. Selling enough action at a high enough markup allows the player to retain a significant piece of their own equity, while paying a much smaller fraction of the buy-in. However, a canny investor can find statistically profitable deals and benefit from player earnings without the time commitment of playing the events themselves.
The Importance of ICM
The appropriate markup for a pre-tournament deal depends only on the player’s expected profit margin—usually called ROI, or Return on Investment. Once a tournament is in the money, however, the situation is more complicated. A player with more chips will be expected to win a bigger prize on average, so a buyer needs to be able to quantify that.
The Independent Chip Model is the standard way tournament poker players calculate the monetary value of chip stacks over the course of a tournament. For instance, it’s commonly used at final tables by players looking to strike a deal and chop up the prize money rather than playing things out. It’s also used to determine how much players should adjust their strategy when approaching the money or final table bubble.
In essence, ICM considers the tournament to be a raffle, where each chip equates to one entry. It imagines that the first-place prize is raffled off first, then the winner’s chips are removed from the pool before the second-place prize is raffled off, and so on. That set of assumptions allows for an approximation of each player’s statistically expected winnings, ignoring skill differences.
Wolters’ spin on the traditional staking arrangement combined ICM calculations with assessments of the player’s likely ROI based on historical performance to arrive at a price.
In the end, Wolters only found three players willing to make a deal. One of these was Brandon Eisen, who agreed to let Wolters use their deal as a specific example. Based on Eisen’s track record, Wolters was willing to buy 10% of his ICM-calculated equity at no markup. Eisen had 3.15 million chips on Day 6, worth $315,000 according to Wolters’ calculations. So the two agreed to a price of $31,500 for 10% of Eisen’s winnings.
Could Deep Staking Catch On?
Although Wolters’ first experiment found minimal uptake, his post about it has attracted attention. Matt Berkey stated on X that it could be a game-changer for high-volume mid-stakes grinders.
IF this gets normalized, this could be a game-changer for the large field grinders out there. So much of an MTTer's career is spent trying to recoup "owed EV" in the massive spots. Having a liquidity pool to layoff risk with is a massive asset for the long term winners. https://t.co/K6eZRk21IQ
— Matt Berkey (@berkey11) July 22, 2025
However, there are upsides and downsides to such a system.
For the player, selling some of their action when already deep into a tournament would be a way to lock up guaranteed profit. Final table runs in large fields happen rarely, and good or bad luck at critical moments can be the difference between a successful tournament career and bankroll disaster.
That’s why final-table deals are so common. However, normalizing deep staking arrangements could allow the same kind of risk mitigation even when final table opponents don’t want to make a deal or ask for too much.
From the investor’s standpoint, buying deep stacks rather than starting stacks means an opportunity to get more money down in favorable spots. Staking players at the start of a big tournament is always a long-shot proposition. Conversely, staking someone in the late stages, e.g. with 50 players left, becomes more like investing in small-field high rollers—except with the chance for bigger skill differentials.
The biggest downside to the system is the need to make big-money deals under intense time pressure. Players typically have 12 hours or less from the end of one tournament day until the start of the next. They need to use most of that for sleep, leaving very little time to consider such an important financial decision, especially if they also want to study and work on their strategy.
For the investor, the downside is that each staking arrangement represents a large sum of cash. That means only well-heeled backers can afford to get into this market unless, like Wolters, they’re willing to do the additional work of raising an investment fund.
Volatility Considerations
What’s somewhat surprising about the concept is that, dollar for dollar, the volatility for the investor doesn’t appear to be all that different from investing before the tournament.
That’s because there are two effects that mostly cancel each other out.
On the one hand, investing just after the money bubble has burst means, effectively, investing in a tournament that is now about 10-15% of the size it was to begin with. Smaller tournaments have less volatility, so deep staking reduces the volatility of each individual deal.
At the same time, however, each trial costs more, so the same-sized investment pool will be divided among fewer investees. For instance, just after the bubble of a $10,000 buy-in event, the average stack value should be around $60,000, not counting the $20,000 min-cash each player has already locked up.
So, an investor with $6,000 to spend could buy 10% of one player after the bubble, or spread the same money between six players before the event. More trials means lower volatility.
PokerScout ran a simulation for a typical event’s payout structure and found little difference between those scenarios over the long term. So, while selling deep in the event is certainly a risk-mitigation decision for the player. For investors, however, the difference is more subtle and may boil down to where they think they’ll find the better deal.
Certainly, there’s a lot more competition for buying action before the event. If an investor like Wolters is the only one offering to buy while deep, they may be able to pay less markup or even negotiate a markdown.
