The Chips curve (CEV)

In the previous module, we introduced the 4 KPIs of the Dashboard and covered the main pitfalls when interpreting CEV. This module moves on to the next step: reading the curves.

Curves let you do what a single number can't: compare several metrics and see how they evolve over time.

In this chapter, we'll take a detailed look at the curves of the Chips won tab, the first tab of the Dashboard .

This tab displays how your chips won evolve over your games. It's the first thing to look at when you open the Dashboard. It answers two simple questions:

• how much of a winning player are you?
• how do you win pots?

As you can see on the screenshot above, the tab displays two curves by default: the green one and the yellow one. In reality, it contains four. The other two (blue and red) are available in the More legends menu, at the bottom right.

A quick concrete check. On the screenshot above, the CEV shown in the KPIs is 112. If you take the final value of the yellow curve (~23,300 chips) and divide it by the 208 games played, you land right on that number.

The yellow curve EV (chips) is literally the "story" that led to your current CEV:

Two relationships to remember so you don't get lost:

• the green and yellow curves measure the same thing (your chips won), from two different angles: what actually happened for the green one, the theoretical expected gains (removing all-in luck) for the yellow one
• the blue and the red are the two components of the green:

Remember the chapter The 4 Dashboard KPIs: we promised back then to give you later the tool that tells you what minimum CEV you need to be a winning player at your stake.

Here it is: the break-even CEV.

It's one of the two hidden legends of the tab (along with the confidence interval we'll cover right after), enabled from the More legends menu at the bottom right.

It appears as a purple line crossing the tab diagonally. This line corresponds to the minimum CEV you need to be a winning player on your room and your format. It takes into account the rake of the room and the structure of your format (starting stack, level duration, multiplier distribution).

The reading is straightforward:

• ↑ your yellow curve above the purple one: on this sample, you're above the break-even threshold
• ↓ your yellow curve below the purple one (like on the screenshot above): on this sample, you're below the break-even threshold

One last point about rakeback: the higher it is, the lower your break-even CEV. It's logical: if part of your earnings comes from rakeback (and not from chips), you need less CEV to be profitable overall.

You can even move the Rakeback (%) slider yourself at the bottom left of the tab (see the chapter Setting up your rakeback): the purple line moves in real time, and you'll see concretely how much your rakeback lowers your break-even threshold.

But careful: the break-even CEV tells you where you stand on your current sample of Spins. Can we conclude from this that you're a winning or losing player in the long run? Not yet. This is precisely where the second hidden legend becomes essential: the confidence interval.

The second legend to enable is the confidence interval, found at the bottom right of the tab in the More legends menu. Once enabled, it frames the final value of your CEV with a bracket: the zone where your true CEV very likely sits, the one you would have over an infinite volume of play.

Crucial point: this bracket isn't an arbitrary ± X. The tracker doesn't just take your CEV and naively add ±20 to it. The interval is computed from two specific things:

• your personal variance: the actual distribution of your session results, hand by hand, all-in by all-in. Two players with the same CEV but different styles will have different intervals.
• your volume of games: the more you've played, the more precise the estimate. The interval tightens progressively as you play more Spins.

The more you play, the more the theoretical distribution of your true CEV (around your observed CEV) tightens. The diagram below illustrates it:

Concretely, the 90% bracket reads as follows: there's a 90% chance that your true CEV sits within this interval. That's why the tracker can give you a reliable estimate of your level well before you've accumulated the "magical 10k Spins sample size" people often talk about on forums.

This time with the confidence interval enabled:

This bracket is very wide, and logically so: with only 203 games, the distribution bell (see the diagram above) is still very spread out around the observed CEV. Uncertainty is high.

But take a good look at the upper bound of the bracket (47): it exceeds the purple line of the break-even CEV (25). In other words, despite an observed CEV below the break-even threshold, it's still statistically possible that our true CEV is in the winning zone in the long run. We therefore can't conclude yet that this player is losing.

More generally, combined with the break-even CEV, the confidence interval gives three possible readings of your curve. Here are the three scenarios, illustrated:

1. Lower bound of the interval above the break-even CEV. You're statistically a winning player even in the pessimistic scenario. You can keep playing this stake with confidence.

2. Break-even CEV inside the interval. You can't conclude yet. Your true CEV may be winning or losing; keep playing and the interval will tighten.

3. Upper bound of the interval below the break-even CEV. Even in the optimistic scenario, you're not profitable on this sample.

The break-even CEV and the confidence interval are therefore two extremely powerful tools of the Chips tab.

They're especially useful for beginner or intermediate players who still doubt their profitability at their stake. An experienced player, who already knows they're winning, doesn't need to consult them daily.

Let's go back now to the two default curves to dig into a point that's often misread: the gap between the green and the yellow. Both measure your chip gains, but with a fundamental difference:

• the green one counts what actually happened (the chips that changed hands),
• the yellow one counts what should have happened if the cards had fallen exactly as probabilities predicted on all-ins.

The gap between the two is pure variance on confrontations. If your green curve is above the yellow one, you've pocketed more chips than your play deserved: you've been lucky on all-ins. If the green is below the yellow, you've won less than expected: you've been unlucky.

In the long run, the two curves end up converging: luck balances out hand after hand. That's why the yellow curve (the CEV) is the true judge of your level, and why the green one is just a variance noise around it. We'll come back to the precise mechanisms of variance in the module Understanding variance.

Let's move quickly through the blue and red curves.

They often look very different from one player to the next, and from one period to the next. Many people think there's a strategic signal to draw from them ("my red curve is flat, I need to bluff more" or "my blue curve is going down, I need to stop calling at showdown").

In reality, there almost never is.

There are 101 mechanical reasons why your blue and red curves can look totally different, on actions that nonetheless often have identical EV. Taking a bluff spot more often than not taking it makes the red rise; calling at the river more often than folding makes the blue rise.

To convince yourself, here are three players all winning (positive CEV), with red curves that nonetheless look radically different:

None of these three players has a particular play issue. Their red curve simply took the shape it took based on the situations they encountered. Don't spend time trying to read something into it: the information that matters (your actual performance and the variance around it) is already fully captured by the green and the yellow. The blue and red curves are a visual curiosity, not a leak-finder tool.

In case you missed it, a summary table by buy-in sits just below the charts. Just scroll down the page to see it appear.

This table gives you, for each buy-in you've played: the number of games, the average CEV, the associated profit and the hourly earnings. Very handy to take stock of your volume, your CEV and your earnings by stake.

The Profit column adapts to the profit mode selected in the Dashboard KPIs: whether you display Profit, EV Multi Profit, EV Profit or Effective EV Profit, the table values follow automatically.

Finally, at the top right of the tab, you have access to a whole battery of filters: period, buy-in, position, multiplier, room, format, fish/reg, and many more.

They let you slice your curve to isolate a specific subset of games and answer more targeted questions:

The filters apply to the whole tab as well as to the associated buy-in table. We dedicate a full chapter to them later in this module: Filters: zooming in on what matters.

The Chips tab is the first tab to read every time you open your Dashboard. Read properly, it tells you in a few seconds where you stand: whether you're making progress, whether you're profitable at your stake, and whether your sample is large enough to conclude.