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, the more you neutralize variance, and the more you earn. It's mathematical.
To illustrate, here's a concrete example.
A player with 70 CEV who plays 200 spins per day will always earn more than a player with 90 CEV who plays 30 spins per week.
The skill gap never compensates for such a massive volume difference. The "weaker" player who plays more makes more money.
The goal is to make money, not to play the highest stake. 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 is usually not learning to play better, it's learning to play more volume.
But volume isn't just what lets you earn more. It's also what makes all analyses possible. With 500 tournaments, stats are noise. With 10,000, they tell a reliable story. Without volume, the tracker is useless.
Volume comes up in every Academy module: more volume = more earnings (Module 2), more readable curves (Module 3), the only weapon against variance (Module 4), material for review (Module 5), an exploitable Leak Finder (Module 6), and the leaderboard rewards it (Module 7).
2. Table quality
The second pillar is less well-known, but equally important.
Few players are aware of it, because no tracker before Poker Spin Tracker highlighted this metric. After studying it for several months, I can tell you just how essential it is.
Table quality, which the fish/reg ratio helps measure, is the indicator that best reveals the EV you can achieve.
Why?
In Spins, you play 3-max. At every table, opponents are either Regs (regular players) or Fish (recreational players).
And regardless of skill level, a great player at a table with 2 regs will always earn less than an average player at a table with 2 fish.
Quite simply.
And the differences are massive: a mere 5% shift in the fish/reg ratio can have a huge impact on earnings. If you're close to a break-even ratio, that shift can mean up to 100% more or less in profits.
This table quality pillar mainly concerns players with over 20% regs at their tables: typically players on .com sites, or players at 5 € and above.
If you understand that the fish/reg indicator almost matters more than CEV, then you understand something that many players, even very good ones, still do not.
Concretely, this means that choosing when to play is as important as playing well. If you play at 3 AM when only regs remain, no matter how good you are, your profits will be limited. If you play during peak fish hours, the game becomes much more profitable.
Poker Spin Tracker measures your exact fish/reg ratio, identifies the time slots where 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 still matters. You need a minimum level of play to win, and that's also where a big part of poker's appeal lies: improving, understanding the game better, and becoming stronger.
Is there really anything more to add?
Key takeaways
• Volume: playing more = earning 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 skill level. Choosing when to play is probably far more important than you think
• These two pillars form a virtuous cycle: more volume helps find the best time slots, and better time slots make volume more profitable
• This is the common thread of the entire Academy. Every module comes back to these two principles.
• And of course skill.
