We study the strange quark mass dependence of the tricritical point of the U (3)L × U (3)R linear sigma model in the chiral limit. Assuming that the tricritical point is at a large strange mass value, the strange sector as well as the η − a0 sector decouples from the light degrees of freedom which determines the thermodynamics. By tracing this decoupling we arrive from the original U (3)L × U (3)R symmetric model, going through the U (2)L × U (2)R symmetric one, at the SU (2)L × SU (2)R linear sigma model. One-loop level beta functions for the running of the parameters in each of these models and tree-level matching of the coupling of these models performed at intermediate scales are used to determine the influence of the heavy sector on the parameters of the SU (2)L ×SU (2)R linear sigma model. By investigating the thermodynamics of this latter model we identified the tricritical surface of the U (3)L × U (3)R linear sigma model in the chiral limit. To apply the results for QCD we used different scenarios for the ms and µq dependence of the effective model parameters, then the µ TCP q (ms) function can be determined. Depending on the details, a curve bending upwards or downwards near µq = 0 can be obtained, while with explicit chemical potential dependence of the parameters the direction of the curve can change with ms, too.