News: How to work less and earn three times more

Our friends at SmartSpin with an important lesson about improving winrates being better than increasing volume.

We often believe that with increased effort, we will get improved results.

That's only half true since maximizing effort can negatively affect many other aspects. Here are a couple of examples:

The more hours monthly you play - the less time you have for learning
The longer sessions you play - the less focused you will be at the end of your session
The more tables you open - the less time you have to think about the decision you have on each table

In poker, we have to understand how significant constant improvement is. Not only do we generate more $EV from games, but also we get closer to promotion to higher stakes where the winrates are higher.

The alchemy of winrate

Let's say you are a 2% EV ROI player on $5 Spins. It means that you should win 10c per game in the long run. How much in percentage do you need to improve your chip EV winrate per game to double your $EV winrate?

I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, and my quick answer was that we need to double our cEV winrate as well, so we needed to aim for 100% improvement. I could not have been further from the truth!

Let’s start with breaking down the “winrate” definition:

NET PROFIT - money you end up with
GROSS PROFIT - net profit before the rake (we often describe it using EVchips term)
WINNINGS - the total amount of income before the cost of the whole buy-in

If we play a $5 Spin & Go game with an 8% rake ($4,6+$0,4), with 5% EV ROI, then our winrates will look like this:

$0.25 - EV NET PROFIT
$0.65 - EV GROSS PROFIT ($0.4 + $0.25)
$5.25 - EV WINNINGS ($4.6 + $0.4 + $0.25)

The snowball effect

Notice that if we make 2% EV ROI, we have already broken the RAKE barrier, which is 8% (at $5 Spins). In fact, we make 10% GROSS EV ROI! Our NET profit is five times lower (2%) because we have to pay the 8% rake.

From a GROSS EV ROI perspective, it’s easier to understand that to double our winrate and increase the NET profit from 2% EV ROI to 4% EV ROI, we need an improvement from 10% to 12% - so only by 20%! And that’s the correct answer to a question on how to double our NET EV PROFIT.

Additionally, as soon as we reach 4% EV ROI, we should move to higher stakes, where our NET PROFIT per game will increase again because of higher buy-in. To count our EV ROI percentage on higher stakes, as a rule of thumb, we should subtract 1% ROI point from our lower stakes EV ROI percentage. Using that rule, we expect to have 3% EV ROI on $10 Spins, which will generate 30c per game.

To sum it up, if we improve our game by 20%, we can expect a winrate increase from 10c/game (2% EV ROI on $5s) to 30c/game (3% EV ROI on $10s) - it’s a 200% increase in NET PROFIT! We didn't need to improve by 100%, we only need to improve our game by 20%!

Less is more

A question comes to mind: how can we easily improve our winrate by 20%?

We could do many things, but there are also many things we shouldn’t do.

There’s a frequent mistake made by many people across the stakes - playing too many tables. On the one hand, playing more tables multiplies our winrate, and on the other hand, they lower the winrate of each game. It’s way easier to make misclicks, play on auto-pilot, develop low-focus habits, skip adjustments, and have less time for making deliberate plays and introducing new strategies, which all-in-all comes to playing low-quality games.

Adding tables and multiplying our winrate is excellent - but not when you play low stakes. Profits from improving your game are more significant as the promotion on low and medium stakes is more manageable than on higher stakes. I recommend focusing on quality until you reach $25 Spins with 3% EV. The lower your EV ROI% is, the more significant the NET profit increase you will see for each improvement.

Every day we stand up to a decision - quality or quantity. Every time you pick putting low-quality volume, you sacrifice your bright future and an opportunity to grow as a poker player by reaching higher stakes.

Don't work hard - work smart!

If you would like to be able to play stakes only based on your EV results unaffected by variance - join Smart Spin, we have great solutions for all poker players searching for improvement, such as EV deal or EV Pool!

This article is written by CuAt69UsdSng, who has been a full-time MTT pro who transitioned to Spin & Go's, where he won more than $1M+ in EV+RB. He is a High Stakes Player, a coach, and CEO of Smart Pool - an EV Pool for Spin & Go's players providing protection from the variance. You can find more about it here .

Previously by CuAt69UsdSng