Chapter 11: 3 basic strategies for Spins (beginner)

The goal of this chapter is to give you three simple and immediately actionable strategies to start building a winning approach in Spins.

You'll notice that most of these concepts focus on preflop play. That's perfectly normal:

And recreational players make their biggest mistakes at this stage.

You can therefore gain a massive edge over your opponents by minimizing your own preflop mistakes while exploiting theirs.

If you're looking for a comprehensive tool to master preflop play in Spins with the most profitable advanced strategies, feel free to check out the Preflop Pack.

When you're on the Button (BTN) in 3-max, you should never limp. This is a common mistake among beginner players.

Your only viable options are:

• Min-raise with your best hands.
• Fold if your hand is too weak to be played.
• Open shove, which becomes interesting below 18 bb with certain hands.

Why avoid limping in this spot?

Limping on the BTN doesn't put enough pressure on the blinds, and doesn't allow you to properly grow the pot with your best hands.

You give the Big Blind a free look at the flop, and the Small Blind an almost free flop, without them having to pay more.

The Small Blind is the hardest position to play in 3-max. Why?

You always play out of position against the BTN and against BB.
The BTN's opening range is generally quite strong, including hands like broadways, Ax, and mid pairs. These hands often dominate yours.

Facing a BTN open (or limp), your strategy should be:

• Lots of 3-bet shoves (all-in).
• A few rare calls with hands that play well postflop.

Why favor the 3-bet shove?

• It puts enormous pressure on the button, who will have to fold a large portion of their range.
• You avoid playing a pot out of position postflop.
• You maximize your fold equity and take advantage of recreational players' tendency to over-call with dominated hands.

Most of your opponents will open shove too tight.

This means you shouldn't call too wide, contrary to theoretical "GTO" strategies (we'll revisit the GTO concept in chapter 13).

In BB in Heads-up (HU) facing an SB Open Shove 17 bb deep for example, prefer a conservative strategy by choosing to only call the top of your range:

Why adopt this approach?

Contrary to what many players think, the data shows that most recreational players facing you have an open-shove range that's too strong in this situation.

Even if a call is slightly profitable (EV+), it's not always optimal. Against recreational players, we want to prolong the game and avoid overly risky confrontations that could eliminate us for a marginal EV gain.

The main goal is to preserve our stack, in order to capitalize on our opponent's future mistakes.

To help you, the table below (from the Preflop Pack) shows which hands to call depending on the number of blinds remaining against an open shove (all-in) from SB in Heads-up.

This table assumes that SB is a recreational player and therefore that we're applying an Exploitative strategy rather than GTO (more details on these concepts will be given in chapter 13):

How to read the chart?

Example: you should call an SB shove with Q7o starting from 6 bb, and starting from 5 bb for T5s.

Suited hands "s" (suited means both cards are of the same suit, e.g.: J♦️8♦️) are above the diagonal.

Offsuit hands "o" (offsuit means both cards are of different suits, e.g.: J♦️8♣️) are below the diagonal.

To summarize the three basic strategies covered in this chapter:

• Never limp on the BTN in 3-max. Raise or fold.
• Prefer 3-bet shoving from the SB rather than calling facing a button open.
• Be conservative with your calls against open shoves. Recreational players shove too tight, don't pay them off too wide.