The 4 Dashboard KPIs

Welcome to module 2! Module 1 was fairly basic all things considered, but things are about to get more technical from here on. So let's get to it.

The Dashboard is the first thing you see when you open the tracker. At the top of the page, four cards sum up the essentials: the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). This chapter explains what each one measures, and why one of them matters more than the others.

The first KPI we're going to talk about is the Tournaments KPI, which simply shows the number of Spins played over the selected period. It's a simple but fundamental piece of data.

In Spin, volume is king. The more you play, the more reliable your data becomes, the more your analysis makes sense, and if you're a winning player, the more money you make. Conversely, with too few tournaments, all the other data in the tracker is statistical noise that's hard to interpret. It's the first pillar of the Spin player, as you now know.

So how many Spins does it take before the tracker really starts to show anything interesting?

This KPI is clickable: one click toggles the display between the number of Spins and the number of hands played over the period.

CEV (Chip Expected Value) is the average number of chips you win per game. It's the most important KPI in the tracker, because it measures your performance, not your result.

What I mean by that is that with your CEV, you can work out whether you're a winning or losing player, and you can assess your level of play compared with the other players at your stake.

We won't go into the details of CEV here: we devote an entire chapter of our free course to it. If the concept is new to you, start there before going any further.

There is no universal rule of thumb for what a good CEV is. Reference CEVs are specific to a room and a format: the starting stack and the blind level duration change everything. No value or progression by stake works perfectly from one context to the next.

The only constant: the further you move up in stakes, the more regs you run into at your tables (that's the second pillar of the Spin player: the fish/reg ratio), and the more your CEV mechanically drops.

The third KPI shows the rakeback. In concrete terms, every time you fire up a Spin, the room takes a commission (the rake). The rakeback is the share of that commission the room pays back to you, as cashback, bonuses or tickets.

In general, rakeback ranges from 0% to 5/6% of the buy-in on the best .com deals. In other words, every time you fire up a €10 Spin, depending on your rakeback offer, you could get between 0 and 60 cents straight back as cashback. Note that rakeback mainly concerns players at €5 and above.

The amount of your rakeback, which therefore varies with your room's offer (which generally depends on your playing volume), is set up directly in Poker Spin Tracker. We'll see how to configure it in an upcoming chapter.

The fourth KPI shows your profit in euros, rakeback included. It's the number everyone cares about, but it's also the most misleading one on a small sample.

Profit is heavily affected by two sources of variance in particular:

• Luck in all-ins: the cards that come on the board
• Luck with multipliers: the jackpots you hit

So a good player can lose money over 500 Spins simply because they didn't hit the right multipliers. The reverse is just as true: an average player can end up well ahead thanks to one x25 they were lucky enough to get. That's why profit alone is not a good indicator of your level of play.

You now know the four KPIs that sum up your activity on the Dashboard. The essential distinction: CEV measures how you played (performance), Profit measures how much you won (result). On a small sample, the two can tell very different stories.