How much variance is there in Spin & Go?
What bankroll do you need? How big a downswing can you go on? How big is the upside of good variance? Your questions answered here.
One of the most common questions players have when they switch to Spin & Go is how much variance there is in them? Variance is obviously one of the toughest things to deal with in poker, that's one of the reasons why we offer our SpinLegends players EV Insurance.
It's really easy to get an idea of how much variance there is in any format using a free piece of software we recommend called SwongSim, but today let's look at a basic example for Spin & Go.
Here we have simulated 10,000 Spin & Go tournaments for a player with a win rate of 36%, and using SwongSim we have done 1,000 simulations:
Don't worry if you don't understand what you are seeing, we'll give you the cliffs.
Most players won between -24 and +460 buy-ins using this simulation. The middle 30% of players won between 117 and 307. 1% of players lost over 200 buy-ins and those random vertical lines you can see are the players who won a massive multiplier game where they won thousands of buy-ins in a single game. So the spread between most of the players is well in its hundreds of buy-ins.
The takeaway from this simulation is that the players who are above EV are VERY above EV, but while most players are under EV, it is not by a huge amount. It's easy to be 10,000 buy-ins over EV in Spin & Go but realistically you will only ever be a few hundred buy-ins under.
If you are wondering what your bankroll should be for Spins then around 40% of players had a low point of -63 buy-ins, meaning that a 50 buy-in bankroll is risky. Likewise 20% of players had a low point of 111 buy-ins, so if you have what most would consider a conservative bankroll of 100 buy-ins that is also by no means safe.
But once again, get on the right side of variance and the number of buy-ins you potentially can win is in its thousands. Spins are not unlike tournaments in that respect, where the top end of the upside is usually much greater than the potential downside.
This is why dollar results are incredibly unreliable in Spin & Go and this is why we judge our players' performance based on ChipEV instead (which is your all-in adjusted chips won divided by the number of tournaments you have played).
In the future we will go into more detail about why we use ChipEV instead of money won. Until then we recommend you play around with SwongSim and if you are interested in taking some of the pressure (and variance) out of Spin & Go, take a look at SpinLegends.
Thinking about getting staked?
The most reliable way to climb the Spin & Go ranks is by joining SpinLegends. We provide the bankroll, world class coaching, support and you also get to rail your fellow SpinLegends members.
As soon as you show promise we move you up in stakes and we even take variance out of the equation with EV Insurance.
