Chapter 3: What ITM do you need to make money in Spins?
This chapter will explain what win percentage (ITM) you need to reach in Spins to be profitable.
Gandalf
Professional Spin & Go player, co-founder of Poker Sciences
At 33% ITM, you're not playing poker, you're sponsoring the site
Expected value with rake
In a €1 Spin, we saw that the winner doesn't actually take home an average of €3 (€1 from each player, including themselves), but rather €2.79, because a portion of the buy-in is taken as rake by the site.
As we saw, the rake can vary depending on the site, but in this chapter we'll assume a rake of 7%, meaning a payout of €2.79 when you win the Spin.
Suppose all three players have exactly the same skill level and a 33% probability of winning each. Their expected value would then be calculated as follows:
Explanation: to calculate the expected value, we take the winnings (€2.79 in case of victory minus the €1 buy-in, i.e. €1.79) and multiply by the probability of winning (1 out of 3 in our scenario, so 0.33). Then we subtract the losses (€1) multiplied by the probability of losing (2 out of 3, so 0.66).
This gives us an expected value of -€0.07.
Now let's calculate how many times you need to win to offset the rake (i.e. to achieve an expected value of €0):
This calculation is a bit more technical, but the details don't matter. Just remember the result.
Result: with a 7% rake, you would need to win at least 35.8% of the time to start being profitable.
In 3-player Spins, ITM (In The Money) means finishing 1st, because (except for the highest jackpots) only the winner takes the prize. An ITM of 35.8% is therefore what you need to start making money in Spins.
But... in reality, it's a bit more complicated than that.
The money collected from players is distributed across all jackpots, including the biggest multipliers. So, to reach that 35.8% target, you would need to hit all jackpots on average, including the highest ones.
Imagine you play 1 billion games: with a 35.8% win rate, as we just calculated, you would break even (meaning neither winning nor losing, an expected value of €0). But if you only play 10,000 games, you would likely never hit a x1000 jackpot, for example.
To sum things up, in reality, the vast majority of players will never hit the biggest jackpots because they simply won't play enough games.
We therefore need to adjust our calculation to account for the fact that we will probably never hit the biggest jackpots.
Effective rake
This is why regular players calculate what is known as the effective rake.
Rather than considering a "standard" 7% rake, they calculate a higher rake, as if the big jackpots didn't exist. This allows them to know exactly what ITM they need to aim for to be profitable, without relying on exceptional jackpots. They treat those jackpots purely as bonuses.
Let's calculate the effective rake for Winamax and Betclic: we will ignore the highest jackpots (the x100,000 and x1,000 on Winamax and the x1,000 on Betclic), as you would need to play an enormous volume of games to have a reasonable chance of hitting them.
| Multiplier | Probability | Sum (€) |
|---|---|---|
| x100,000 | 0 / 10,000,000 | 0 |
| x1,000 | 0 / 10,000,000 | 0 |
| x100 | 2,000 / 10,000,000 | 200,000 |
| x50 | 10,000 / 10,000,000 | 500,000 |
| x10 | 150,000 / 10,000,000 | 1,500,000 |
| x5 | 400,000 / 10,000,000 | 2,000,000 |
| x4 | 825,000 / 10,000,000 | 3,300,000 |
| x3 | 2,674,208 / 10,000,000 | 8,022,624 |
| x2 | 5,938,688 / 10,000,000 | 11,877,376 |
| Total | €27,400,000 |
| Multiplier | Probability | Sum (€) |
|---|---|---|
| x1,000 | 0 / 1,000,000 | 0 |
| x100 | 100 / 1,000,000 | 10,000 |
| x20 | 500 / 1,000,000 | 10,000 |
| x10 | 5,000 / 1,000,000 | 50,000 |
| x5 | 40,000 / 1,000,000 | 200,000 |
| x4 | 130,000 / 1,000,000 | 520,000 |
| x3 | 346,210 / 1,000,000 | 1,038,630 |
| x2 | 478,185 / 1,000,000 | 956,370 |
| Total | €2,785,000 |
On Winamax, by removing the big jackpots, we get an effective rake of:
On Betclic, the effective rake is:
(3,000,000 - 2,785,000) / 3,000,000 = 7.17%
We can see that the effective rake is higher on Winamax (8.6%), making the Winamax structure less favorable compared to Betclic (7.17%).
What ITM should you actually target to win?
Thanks to the effective rake, we can calculate the ITM percentage you actually need to be a winner on each platform. I'll spare you the detailed calculations, but you can redo them yourself using the elements above and with a bit of elbow grease.
Here's what we get:
- For Winamax: an ITM of approximately 36.5% is needed to beat the effective rake.
- For Betclic: an ITM of approximately 35.9% is needed to beat the effective rake.
This difference might seem small to the untrained eye, but make no mistake — it's not! It is in fact enormous over a large number of games and makes grinding on Winamax much harder in terms of variance (we'll cover this concept later) than on Betclic.
Summary
Theoretically, over a very large number of games, you just need to beat the rake to start winning in Spins, which corresponds to an ITM of at least 35.8%.
In practice, however, you will probably never hit the biggest jackpots.
You will therefore need a higher ITM to start being profitable. This ITM depends on the jackpot structure of each site: 36.5% for Winamax and 35.9% for Betclic. It is therefore easier to make money on some sites than on others.
Once again, this 0.6% difference may seem small, but over a large number of games it is far, very far, from being insignificant.