Gambler's Ruin and the ICM
Abstract
Consider gambler's ruin with three players, 1, 2, and 3, having initial capitals , , and units. At each round a pair of players is chosen (uniformly at random) and a fair coin flip is made resulting in the transfer of one unit between these two players. Eventually, one of the players is eliminated and play continues with the remaining two. Let be the elimination order (e.g., means player 1 is eliminated first and player 3 is eliminated second, leaving player 2 with units). We seek approximations (and exact formulas) for the elimination order probabilities . Exact, as well as arbitrarily precise, computation of these probabilities is possible when is not too large. Linear interpolation can then give reasonable approximations for large . One frequently used approximation, the independent chip model (ICM), is shown to be inadequate. A regression adjustment is proposed, which seems to give good approximations to the elimination order probabilities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2011.07610,
title = {Gambler's Ruin and the ICM},
author = {Persi Diaconis and Stewart N. Ethier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.07610},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
32 pages, 5 figure files