The red line in poker: reading your non-showdown winnings in Spin & Go

A tracker splits your winnings into two curves. The blue one adds up the hands that went to showdown, the ones where cards were turned over. The red one adds up everything else: the pots you take because everybody folded, and the chips you leave behind when you fold. That one is what players call the red line.

Together they make the green curve, the chips you actually won. There is nothing else in a result: every chip comes either from a showdown or from a fold. So the red line answers a simple question: what are your hands worth when nobody sees them?

The figures on this page come from a real, winning history of 3,000 spins with 1,500 chips in play, close to 40,000 hands. One history is not a norm: the proportions change from one player to the next, the mechanics do not.

What the red line adds up

Three hands out of four end without a showdown: 75% here. The red line is the everyday curve, the one made of small pots following one another, where the blue line is the curve of the big ones. In this history it brings in 46 chips per spin out of the 76 won, 61% of the result.

It only counts four things: pots taken before the flop, on a raise or a shove nobody calls; chips given up before the flop, most often a blind; pots taken after the flop on a bet that gets a fold; and hands released after the flop when facing a bet.

It is won before the flop

After the flop, the red line of this history breaks even: the pots taken on a bet pay, to within half a chip, for the hands released. All the profit comes from before the flop. Pots taken without seeing a card bring in 140 chips per spin, blinds and raises given up cost 94.

That is how the format works. Three-handed, you post a blind two hands out of three; heads-up, every hand. The red line starts with a permanent handicap, and it only climbs if your raises and shoves take more pots than your blinds hand back.

In Spin & Go, the blue line is the all-in line

In a cash game, a showdown is most often a hand played down to the river. Here, 68% of showdowns are shoves called before the flop: the cards are turned over, the board runs out, and nobody decides anything any more. The blue line therefore carries all the all-in luck. The gap between your actual chips and your cEV, the luck-adjusted result, sits entirely in the blue line: a hand without a showdown has no luck to adjust.

The consequence shows on the chart. From one spin to the next, the blue line swings three times as much as the red one. Cut the history into stretches of 100 spins: the red line is positive in 99 stretches out of 100, the blue line in only two out of three, for the same player. The red line is the part of your results that reads quickly: a few hundred spins show its slope, where the blue line needs thousands.

Where it climbs, where it falls

Three-handed, the red line is almost flat, at 3 chips per spin: the button takes pots, the two blinds hand them back. The blue line makes the result, with 40 chips per spin. Heads-up, everything flips: the red line brings in 43 chips per spin, more than nine tenths of its total, and the blue line drops below zero. The blinds are high, every fold by the opponent is a visible share of the stack, and the small blind, who has the button, collects most of them.

Stack depth says the same thing another way. At 15 BB and more, the red line is close to zero and the blue line makes the result. Below 15 BB, the red line carries everything: three-handed, a shove that folds out both blinds wins 1.5 BB without a showdown, and at 8 BB that is close to a fifth of the stack.

When it stalls or dives: three places to look

Blinds handed back too quickly. A big blind that folds too much against a min-raise or a limp, a small blind that gives up too often heads-up: every extra fold adds to the line of chips given up. It is the quietest leak, because none of those hands looks like a mistake.

Pots you do not go and get. A button that is too tight, shoves missed as a short stack, a small blind that limps where the range raises: the line of pots taken before the flop gets thinner. In the history studied, that line makes all the profit.

The flop given up. After the flop, one indicator keeps an eye on the red line: the share of flops seen that you win (WWSF). The rough benchmark runs from 45 to 55%, and the history studied sits at 47%. Below 45% you are letting too many pots go, through missed c-bets or folds that come too fast against the opponent’s bet.