The three pillars of the Spin player
Volume, table quality, and skill: the three pillars of the Spin player.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
This chapter on the three pillars of the Spin player is probably one of the most important in the entire Academy.
Everything covered in the following modules stems from these three fundamental principles: volume, table quality, and skill.
These three pillars are simple to understand, but many players underestimate them, especially the first two. Those who truly integrate them into their approach are the ones who will go the furthest.
1. Volume
In Spins, volume is king.
The more you play, the more reliable your data becomes, the more you neutralize variance, and the more money you make. It's just math.
To really get this, let's take a concrete example.
A player with 70 CEV who plays 200 Spins a day will always make more than a player with 90 CEV who plays 30 Spins a week.
A gap in skill never makes up for a volume gap that massive. The "weaker" player who plays more makes more money.
The goal is to make money, not to play the highest stakes. Two levers for that: moving up in stakes, or playing more tables. We often tend to forget the second option...
In 90% of cases, if you've been playing for a long time and you're a winning player, your biggest lever usually isn't learning to play better, it's learning to put in more volume.
But volume isn't only what lets you win more. It's also what makes every analysis possible. With 500 tournaments, your stats are noise. With 10,000, they tell a reliable story. Without volume, a tracker is useless.
Volume comes back in every module of the Academy: more volume = more profit (Module 2), more readable curves (Module 3), the only weapon against variance (Module 4), material for your Review (Module 5), a Leak Finder you can actually use (Module 6), and the Leaderboard that rewards it (Module 7).
2. Table quality
The second pillar is less well known, but just as important.
Few players are aware of it, because no tracker before Poker Spin Tracker put this metric front and center. After studying it for several months, I can tell you just how essential it is.
Table quality, which the fish/reg ratio lets you measure, is the indicator that best reveals the EV you can actually make.
Why?
In Spins, you play 3-max. At every table, your opponents are either Regs (regular players) or Fish (recreational players).
And regardless of skill level, a very good player at a table with 2 regs will always make less than an average player at a table with 2 fish.
Simple as that.
And the gaps are huge: a difference of just 5% in the fish/reg ratio can have a massive impact on profits. If you're close to a break-even ratio, that gap can double your profits or wipe them out.
This table quality pillar mainly concerns players with more than 20% regs at their tables: typically players on .com sites, or players at €5 and above.
If you've understood that the fish/reg indicator almost makes more sense than CEV, then you've understood things that a lot of players, even very good ones, haven't.
Concretely, this means that choosing your time slots is as important as playing your hands well. If you play at 3am when only regs are left, no matter how good you are, your profits will be limited. If you play in the time slots when the fish are around, the game becomes far more profitable.
Poker Spin Tracker measures your exact fish/reg ratio, identifies the time slots where the tables are softest, and quantifies how much CEV that represents. All of this will be broken down in Module 8, be patient...
3. Skill
Obviously, skill remains essential. You need a minimum skill level to win, and it's also where a big part of what makes poker fun lies: improving, understanding the game better, getting stronger.
Is there really anything more to say?
Key takeaways
• Volume: playing more = winning more, but also = analyzing better. Without enough volume, the tracker's data has no value
• Table quality: the fish/reg ratio impacts profits as much as level of play. Choosing when to play is probably far more important than you think
• These two pillars form a virtuous circle: more volume helps you find the best time slots, and the best time slots make volume more profitable
• It's the common thread of the entire Academy. Every module comes back to these two principles.
• And of course skill.
