Welcome to the Leak Finder
The Leak Finder, its dual purpose (your own game and your opponents'), and the reference strategy concept that makes leaks visible despite variance.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
The Leak Finder is the most powerful tool in Poker Spin Tracker. Simply put, it has a dual purpose: finding the spots where you make mistakes in your own game, and finding those where your opponents make mistakes so you can exploit them.
Before diving into the different tabs of the Leak Finder, this chapter lays the foundations: what a leak is, why you need a reference strategy to make it visible, and what each tab of the Leak Finder lets you do today.
1. What is a leak?
A leak is a suboptimal action. Concretely: at a given moment, you make a decision that isn't the one that maximizes your EV. The word evokes the image of water seeping out, drop by drop.
A suboptimal decision is a tiny loss on the scale of a single hand, but it becomes very costly on the scale of thousands of hands if it repeats in the same kind of spot.
The problem is that a leak doesn't show itself on its own. In poker, variance crushes everything in the short term: EV gains and losses get mixed up with luck and bad luck.
You can make the wrong decision and win the hand.
You can make the right one and lose it.
Apart from major leaks (limping systematically on the BTN, folding all the time in the BB facing a BTN open, etc.), a leak never reveals itself directly in your results, even over several thousand hands.
That's why the Leak Finder doesn't measure your results. It compares your game to a reference strategy.
Without a reference, it's impossible to say whether an action is optimal or not: you're just looking at variance. With a reference and a decent volume, your gaps become measurable and your leaks come out.
Over thousands of decisions, small mistakes pile up and have a major impact on your long-term winnings.
2. The three reference strategies
A reference strategy is a known strategy that yours is compared against to measure your gaps. The Leak Finder relies on three types of reference.
None of them is perfect: they complement each other. We will see later which tab of the Leak Finder relies on which reference.
| Reference | What it is for | Its limit |
|---|---|---|
| GTO (theoretical) | Equilibrium strategy, computed by a solver. Theoretically optimal play, independent of the opponent. | GTO ignores opponents' leaks. Sticking to it 100% makes you miss out on exploitation, which is part of the edge in Spins. |
| Built exploit strategy | You start from GTO, then deliberately deviate to exploit the leaks of the opponents you face at your stake. | Requires knowing opponents' leaks and being able to build the deviation. It's the hardest part, but also the most profitable in the game. |
| Regs of your stake | The average strategy of regular players at your buy-in. An empirical reference: what the players who beat the stake actually do. | It isn't necessarily optimal. Regs can share the same leaks. It's not an absolute reference. |
Concretely, GTO tells you what is correct in absolute terms. The exploit strategy tells you what is profitable against your pool. The regs strategy gives you a concrete benchmark, readable without any theoretical background.
3. Analyzing your game, analyzing your opponents' game
The Leak Finder lets you do both types of analysis, but they are not at the same level of difficulty.
Analyzing your own game
This is the most accessible use. You have an external reference (GTO, regs, your exploit reference), you look at your strategy, you read the gap.
The work requires rigor and a minimum of basics in reading data, but it's well-marked: spot the gap, understand where it comes from, fix it.
Analyzing your opponents' game
This is significantly more complex. Spotting a leak in an opponent isn't enough: to profit from it, you have to build a counter-strategy in your own game that directly exploits this mistake, without opening up a new flaw in yours along the way.
This step combines data reading, strategic understanding and a lot of work. It's also where the biggest long-term improvement potential lies.
In my opinion, this analysis is essential for players who want to understand the game deeply. It takes you through different stages of understanding and different reflections on what really matters in poker.
But don't worry: if you don't have the desire or not yet the level to do this work, it's our job to provide you with a first reference for an exploit strategy, both in the Preflop Pack and later in the Postflop Pack.
You will have all the time in the world (or not) to start from this reference and eventually go further, building strategies that better suit your style of play, or that are more sharply tuned against your pool.
4. The four tabs of the Leak Finder
The Leak Finder bundles four tabs.
Each analyzes your game (and that of your opponents) at a specific point in the game, with a different reference strategy, and at its own level of depth. We present them here in the order of the chapters that follow: from the most "localized" (Preflop) to the synthesis (Analysis).
| Tab | What it does | Reference used |
|---|---|---|
| Preflop | Deep analysis. Compares your range cell by cell (13×13 grid) to our reference Charts, or to your custom Charts, on each predefined situation. It's the tab where the measurement is the most reliable. | Poker Sciences Charts (GTO and Exploit), or your custom Charts. |
| Postflop | Medium-depth analysis. Compares your postflop frequencies (CBet, fold vs bet, etc.) to those of regs at your stake. Gives a solid benchmark of your level, with no theoretical pretension. | Average strategy of regs at your buy-in. |
| Global EV | The most powerful tab. Measures the EV in bb per hand that you generate in a situation, combo by combo, and compares it to theory. Also lets you compare the EV of several actions on the same spot. Covers preflop, flop, turn and river in a single tool (or only preflop when actions are all-in / fold). | Theoretical EV coming from a solver. |
| Analysis | The automatic synthesis of the three other tabs. Gives you the overall picture of your leaks at a glance. | Aggregation of the three others. |
The Analysis tab can serve as a starting point (to spot where to look first), or as an ending point (to take stock after studying your leaks in detail). You'll choose the direction that fits the way you work.
5. What the Leak Finder will become
The current Leak Finder only covers part of the game.
Postflop is analyzed only through the average of the regs, not through a theoretical reference nor through exploit references.
And all the analyses focus on predefined situations, not on the spots you'd want to dig into freely.
The next major updates will change that. The release of the Postflop Pack will bring theoretical references on postflop. Another big update will open up fully customized analyses on the spots of your choice, beyond predefined situations. And the building of our own solver will allow us to go further in building exploit strategies: it will rely directly on the opponent ranges collected by the tracker, to produce strategies truly adapted to your pool.
At that point, the Leak Finder will be able to analyze your game from A to Z, and even evaluate the relevance of your deviations: how far an exploit is profitable, and where it starts costing you more than it brings in.
6. Key takeaways
The Leak Finder makes visible the leaks that variance hides, by comparing your game to reference strategies. It is today the most powerful analysis tool in the tracker, and it is set to become even more so with the upcoming updates.
• A leak is a suboptimal action. Variance hides it in your results: only a reference strategy makes it measurable.
• Three complementary references: GTO (theoretical), a built exploit strategy (your pool-specific adaptation), regs of your stake (empirical).
• The Leak Finder analyzes both your game and that of your opponents. The second use is more demanding: it requires building a counter-strategy.
• Four tabs in the order of the chapters of this module: Preflop, Postflop, Global EV, Analysis.
The definitions are laid out, you know what each tab is for and with which reference. The next chapter tackles the first tab in detail with preflop accuracy, a score that tells you at a glance whether your preflop holds up.
Perhaps you wonder what became of the mage and his apprentice?
Fear not, they survived, unlike the ship's captain and the greater part of the crew.
Yet held captive within the imperial city of Sang-Clair, their fate remains, all the same, most uncertain.