The Bankroll curve
Read the gaps between the 4 profit modes over time, and understand what they reveal about your luck and your room.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
In the chapter The 4 profit modes, we saw that in Poker Spin Tracker, the 4th KPI, at the top right of the Dashboard , offers 4 possible options:
Profit: your actual earnings in euros, rakeback included.
Effective EV Profit: what you should have won on your sample, given your CEV and the multipliers you were supposed to hit.
EV Profit: your theoretical long-term profit, at infinite volume.
EV Multi Profit: your profit with the multipliers you actually hit, without the variance of all-ins.
Now we're moving on to reading the curves that correspond to these 4 profit modes.
A number is a photo. A curve is a film. The four modes observed over time and layered on the same chart let you read what the KPI alone can't show: how the gaps between the curves evolve.
The 4 curves of the Bankroll tab
The Bankroll tab, right after the Chips won tab in the Dashboard , displays two curves by default: the blue one (Profit) and the pink one (Effective EV Profit). The other two curves, purple (EV Profit) and orange (EV Multi Profit), are available in the More legends menu at the bottom right.
| Curve | Color | Default | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profit | Blue | Yes | Your actual earnings in euros, rakeback included |
| Effective EV Profit | Pink | Yes | What you should have won on your sample, given the multis you were supposed to hit |
| EV Profit | Purple | No | Your theoretical long-term profit, at infinite volume |
| EV Multi Profit | Orange | No | Your profit with the multis you actually hit, without the variance of all-ins |
This chapter doesn't redefine the curves. For the detailed definition of each one (and especially the notion of effective rake that explains the pink), go back to the chapter The 4 profit modes. Here, we're looking at the curves over time, and what their gaps reveal.
Blue vs pink: luck over time
The pink one (Effective EV Profit) tells you what you should have won. The blue one (Profit) tells you what you actually won.
The gap between the two measures your global luck on the sample: the sum of luck on all-ins and luck on multis.
What the chart adds compared to the KPI is the time dimension. It no longer just tells you:
Are you lucky or unlucky?
It tells you how and when you got there.
Three typical shapes for this gap:
1. Gap that oscillates around zero. Both curves closely follow each other, drift apart a little, come back together. It's a neutral run, the usual variance noise of a sample in progress.
2. Blue that lifts off above the pink. The gap widens in favor of the blue. The main cause, by far: luck on all-ins.
You've won more all-in confrontations than your equity predicted, and it's not "normal" to have won that much on your sample.
You can actually check this directly on the previous tab: on your Chips curve, the green one should sit above the yellow one.
The other possible cause, rarer but visually more dramatic: a big jackpot won (x100, x1000, x2500). The pink wasn't expecting that multi on your sample: the gap jumps up all at once, on a single Spin.
3. Blue that slides progressively below the pink. No break, a steady descent over several sessions. The main cause is a lasting all-in downswing: you keep losing spots where you were the favorite, hand after hand, and the pink stays at the level your play placed it.
On a mid-sized sample (roughly between 5,000 and 60,000 games), this drop can also signal that you haven't hit your big jackpots yet compared to what your volume statistically predicted. We'll come back to this right below.
The final value of the blue/pink gap quantifies the luck (or bad luck) of your sample. Its shape over time, on the other hand, tells you where it came from: an isolated event (break), a stretched phenomenon (progressive spread), or simply the usual variance (oscillation).
➕ The tracker can also quantify this luck precisely, via the Run Luck badge. We'll come back to it in the chapter The Run Luck Badge.
Pink vs purple: your room's imprint
The gap between the pink and the purple tells a different story from luck: it measures your statistical debt on big multis. The share of your theoretical earnings that the room has promised you in the long run, but that hasn't yet been delivered in the form of x100, x1000 or x2500 on your sample.
This is the potential reason for a widening gap between the blue and pink curves that we mentioned in case 3 just above. The pink vs purple gap lets you clearly see this phenomenon. It shows you how much the room promises you in the long run (the purple curve) and how much the volume you've played so far doesn't let you claim it yet (the pink curve).
As a reminder, the purple curve takes into account the multipliers you should have if you played an infinite volume (which is never the case, of course), while the pink curve only takes into account the multipliers you have a reasonable chance of hitting on the volume you've actually played.
This gap isn't the same for every player. It depends strongly on one thing: your room's multiplier distribution. And the rule is simple:
The more the room concentrates its value into rare big multis, the more the pink lags behind the purple, and the more time it will take to catch up.
Do it now, it's the best way to understand it.
Go to My account > My Room and switch your room to Winamax (an unfavorable room from this angle), or from Winamax to Betclic (a favorable room instead). Then come back to your Bankroll chart and you'll see that depending on the room you select, the gap between the pink and purple curves will be different.
What you'll see:
- on a room that spreads its value across rare ultra-big jackpots (which only materialize at the million-Spin scale), the pink/purple gap is wide. As long as you haven't reached the volume that makes hitting these big multis statistically likely, your pink stays far below your purple
- on a room with a more evenly spread distribution (with more money captured by small and medium multis, and less by the ultra-big ones), the gap is tighter. Your pink grinds close to your purple from almost the very first Spins
What it looks like in the long run
To convince yourself, here's the same simulation over 100,000 Spins at €10, with a 50 CEV player, in the two room setups:
Two images, two stories. On some rooms (like Betclic), the pink/purple gap widens at the start then closes quickly: the pink catches up to the purple within a few tens of thousands of Spins. On other rooms (like Winamax), this gap only widens and almost never closes, unless you play several million Spins.
For players in progress with still limited volume, the pink is therefore often the most honest indicator to follow: it tells you where you are today, not what your room promises you in a "long run" that may or may not be reached.
After the experiment, put your original room back in My account. All the tracker's EV calculations (effective rake, simulation, profitability thresholds) depend on this setting: playing Winamax with a Betclic setup selected gives you wrong curves.
Want to go further and project your current sample over time to see at what volume your pink will catch up to your purple? That's exactly the topic of the next chapter: Simulating your bankroll future.
EV Multi Profit (orange): when to use it
The orange curve neutralizes only the variance of all-ins, on the multipliers you actually hit. It's not a curve to watch day to day, but it becomes very telling in one specific case: when you had the luck to hit a big multi and you lost the Spin.
Typical example. You land on a x400, and you lose the Spin. You weren't necessarily the favorite, but in the long run you would have won a share of those Spins. That's exactly what the orange quantifies. Here's what happens on the four curves:
- the blue loses the equivalent of the buy-in (you lose your buy-in)
- the pink and the purple barely move (neither was expecting that lucky x400 on your sample)
- the orange lifts off sharply: with the multi you did hit, your equity was promising you a fraction of that Spin, and that's the expectation it captures
That's exactly the kind of moment the orange exists for. On a long sample with no big multi hit, it stays stuck to the other curves and doesn't bring much. Turn it on occasionally, after a standout spot, to quantify what your equity would have earned you on that specific multi.
The Events: landmarks on the curve
In the More legends menu, one last option lets you display Events on the chart. These are small markers placed on the curve to flag standout moments from your sample.
Five types of events can appear:
- Peak: your bankroll peak over the filtered period
- Bottom: your low point (displayed only if negative)
- Jackpot: an isolated gain exceptionally high compared to your usual earnings
- Downswing: one of the biggest downswings in the sample
- Spin breakeven: a long period during which your bankroll came back to the same level
The monthly table (hidden feature)
As in the Chips tab, a summary table sits just below the chart. Just scroll down the page to see it appear. The difference: here, it's broken down by month, not by buy-in.
This table gives, for each month: the number of tournaments played, the profit excluding rakeback, the rakeback and the total profit. By clicking on a month, you can expand the day-by-day detail. Very handy to spot a slow month, an up month or simply the consistency of your volume throughout the year.
The Profit column adapts to the active mode in the Dashboard KPIs: switch between Profit, Effective EV Profit, EV Profit or EV Multi Profit, and the table's amounts follow automatically.
The filters: an overview
Above the chart, a few filters let you slice your Bankroll curve. They're simpler than the ones in the Chips tab, but enough to isolate a period or a subset of games. They apply to the whole tab, monthly table included.
A full chapter will be dedicated to filters later in this module: Filters: zooming in on what matters. For now, just remember that they exist.
Key takeaways
The Bankroll curve takes the 4 modes of the Profit KPI and layers them over time. What the KPI alone can't show, the chart reveals: the gaps between the curves and how they evolve.
• Day to day, blue + pink are enough. Purple and orange come in occasionally via the More legends menu.
• Blue vs pink = your global luck (all-ins + multis). Focus mostly on the shape: break = big multi, progressive spread = all-in downswing.
• Pink vs purple = the effect of your room. The more money is captured by rare big multis, the more the pink stays far below the purple.
• Orange = occasional tool to assess your luck on the multipliers you actually got.
• The monthly table under the chart follows the active profit mode.
