The Run Luck Badge: quantify your luck
Understand what the Run Luck badge measures, how to read it, and what it does not replace in your diagnostic.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
Every Spin player ends up asking themselves the same question sooner or later, especially after a streak of lost or won flips.
Am I lucky or unlucky?
Poker Spin Tracker answers that question with a visual and numerical indicator: the Run Luck Badge, displayed right next to your chips and bankroll curves.
This chapter explains what it measures, how to read it, and also what it does not measure.
1. What the badge measures
Across your entire displayed sample, the badge compares the gap between your actual winnings and their expected value (EV).
Chips tab: gap between your chips actually won and your EV (chips).
Bankroll tab: gap between your Profit and your Effective EV Profit.
It normalizes that gap by the expected variance of the sample, which gives a z-score. That z-score is then translated into a percentile.
Don't worry, you don't need to understand what a z-score is. Reading the percentile, on the other hand, is very intuitive. Imagine 100 virtual players who would have played exactly the same all-in spots as you. And ask yourself:
How many would have a gap this large between these two curves (actual winnings vs expected winnings)?
The percentile gives the answer. A 5% percentile on the positive side means that only 5 players out of 100 would have been as lucky as you, or even luckier. On the negative side, the logic is symmetrical.
Here are the different badges based on the percentile:
| Luck | Bad luck | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Divine | Cursed | Top 3% |
| Blessed | Damned | Top 7.5% |
| Lucky | Unlucky | Top 15% |
| Fortunate | Unfortunate | Top 25% |
| Running good | Running bad | Top 33% |
The badge only shows from 50 games upwards. Below that, the z-score is too unstable: a Divine or a Cursed over 20 games means nothing, displaying a badge would be misleading.
2. What it covers (and what it does not)
The badge measures all-in luck (the gap between your chips actually won and your EV (chips), or between your Profit and your Effective EV Profit on the bankroll side).
It does not cover the three other residual variances from chapter 4.1:
- The cards you are dealt (the luck of having received good cards or not over your played volume)
- The opponent ranges at showdown (being called by a favorable or unfavorable range)
- The non-all-in spots (3bet fold, river call, bluff)
A Running bad badge means you have lost more flips than expected. That's all.
It is entirely possible that on top of that you went through, for instance, a heavy card drought; the Run Luck badge does not take that into account.
3. The badge does not tell you whether you play well
Of course, the Run Luck Badge is not a skill indicator. It measures a run gap between your actual results and your EV at all-ins, not the quality of your decisions.
To assess your skill level, the references remain the CEV and the confidence interval, covered in chapter 3.1.
Concrete example: your badge shows Cursed over 2,000 games and, on that same sample, your CEV is very low. Don't conclude that your CEV is low because you've been unlucky! These are two completely different pieces of information:
- To measure your skill level: CEV + confidence interval.
- To measure your all-in luck: Run Luck Badge.
