Reading the chips adjusted curve
What the yellow EV (chips) curve really removes from variance, and what it still leaves in.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
We've been telling you since the start of the Academy: CEV is the ultimate judge. It's what decides whether you're a winning player at your stake, which is why every player stops at the yellow EV (chips) curve when they open their Dashboard .
The chips adjusted curve is synonymous with the EV (chips) curve. It's a way of saying this curve is a chip curve from which variance has been "removed".
Which means this curve deserves a closer look. Because there's a paradox many players run into: their yellow curve goes down even though they feel they're playing well, and even though the chapter The Chips Curve explained that this curve neutralizes all-in luck.
We'll answer this question in particular:
Why is it sometimes negative on a small sample of Spins, even for winning players?
To answer that question, this chapter breaks down the sources of variance the yellow curve cannot neutralize, and gives you a sense of what's normal on a small sample.
If concepts like variance, CEV or sample percentiles are new to you, start with the Variance in Spin & Go chapter of our free course. This chapter is its logical follow-up, on the Poker Spin Tracker side.
1. What the yellow curve actually promises
Reminder from chapter 3.1: the yellow EV (chips) curve replaces, on every all-in, the actual result with the mathematical expectation of the spot (your equity multiplied by the pot).
Example. You go all-in with AKs vs QQ at equal stacks, your equity is around 46%. Two possibilities:
- you lose the flip: the green curve drops by your lost stack ↓
- you win the flip: the green curve rises by your opponent's stack ↑
In both cases, the yellow curve only moves by the expectation of the spot (46% of the opponent's stack, minus 54% of your own). This number is the same whether you won or lost the flip.
On every all-in, the yellow curve always records the expectation of the spot, never its actual result. That's what makes it immune to all-in luck.
It's powerful, but that's also all the yellow curve does. It neutralizes all-in variance, and only all-in variance.
The gap between the green curve and the yellow curve (precisely the all-in luck the yellow curve neutralizes) is actually quantified automatically on the Dashboard by the Run Luck Badge. We'll come back to it later in this module.
2. The three variances it leaves intact
On a small sample, three sources of variance keep impacting your yellow curve. The tracker can't do anything about them: these variances can't be corrected with a formula.
2.a The cards you're dealt
You don't get every hand at the same frequency, and on a small sample, that frequency can stray quite far from its theoretical average.
A pair of AA comes on average once every 221 hands. Over 500 Spins (4,000 to 6,000 hands depending on the format), you should be dealt between 20 and 30. In practice, the gap between "lucky" and "unlucky" on that same sample can be two-to-one: 15 on one side, 35 on the other.
Multiply this gap by every playable hand, by every position, and by every opponent profile you face: truly favorable combinations (strong hand + good position + weak opponent) become rare even faster than hands taken in isolation. The yellow curve has no way to invent EV on spots that didn't happen.
The yellow curve captures the EV of the spots you did play. It doesn't correct for the fact that favorable (or unfavorable) spots didn't show up.
2.b The all-in showdowns
The yellow curve neutralizes the outcome of the flip, but not which hand you end up all-in against. You shove with A8 in a spot where your opponents are supposed to fold most of the time, and call with a range you dominate (weaker Aces, Kx, suited connectors, etc.). The bad luck is when they call anyway with AT+: you're dominated. Over 300 Spins, these calls with the top of their range may show up more often than their theoretical distribution predicts.
The yellow curve records your actual equity against their actual hand. If your showdowns have been unfavorable, it goes down, even though your shove decision was +EV against their theoretical range.
The yellow curve neutralizes the luck of the showdown, not the luck of the ranges you face.
2.c The non-all-in spots
The yellow curve only corrects all-ins. Everything that's decided without going all-in stays in the curve, exactly as it happened in reality:
- a 3bet that gets folded to vs a 3bet that gets called: the result depends on the opponent
- a river call that pays off or not
- a bluff that goes through or gets paid off
In Spins, most big pots go all-in before the river, so this source is less brutal than in cash games. But it exists: the deeper the effective stack, the more non-all-in decisions pile up, and the more their variance shows on the yellow curve.
The yellow curve is blind to everything that gets decided before the chips go to the middle.
When your yellow curve starts dropping, the question that always nags at you is the same: is a leak creeping into my game, or because of one of these three causes of variance that the yellow curve can't neutralize?
The only honest way to settle it is to look at the 90% confidence interval from the chapter The Chips Curve. It alone tells you how close your CEV in Poker Spin Tracker is to your true skill level.
Key takeaways
The yellow curve is the most powerful tool on the Dashboard for judging your level, but it's not infallible. It only neutralizes the outcome of all-ins, and three other sources of variance keep moving it as long as your sample isn't large enough.
The only honest way to settle the question remains the 90% confidence interval.
