BTN

👀 Key takeaways

1️⃣ The Button is the most profitable position. Prioritize mastering it to maximize your earnings.

2️⃣ Obviously, never limp. You probably already know this, but limping on the Button is always a mistake. You should either min-raise, open shove, or fold.

3️⃣ From around 18bb, start incorporating open shoves (OS) into your range — especially with hands that are highly profitable to shove (Ax and Pocket Pairs in particular).

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1. The most profitable position in Spin & Go

The Button is where you make the most money in Spin & Go (~30 CEV / game).

Unlike the blinds, where you’re often out of position and forced to defend with weak ranges, the Button allows you to play a wide range while having a postflop advantage.

Working on your Button play is highly profitable and key for your progress. It’s one of the positions — along with the SB in Heads-up — where you’ll get the highest return on your study time.

2. The main beginner mistake on the Button: limping

If you’re reading this, you probably already know it (we're stating the obvious here) but limping on the Button is always a mistake.

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❓Why not limp?

Limping on the Button doesn't put enough pressure on the blinds, fails to leverage your strategic advantage, and prevents you from building the pot properly with your best hands.

The Button is a "free" position: if your hand is too weak to min-raise (MR), it’s better to fold. You lose nothing by waiting for a better spot.

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➡️ What you should do:

Min-raise (2x) with your good hands, sometimes 2.5x with the very strongest ones.

Fold the rest. This simplifies your strategy and helps you play cleaner and more efficiently.

3. On the Button, you must apply pressure to the blinds

❓Why are you advantaged?

Of course, you act last postflop, allowing you to adopt an optimal strategy based on the blinds' actions.

Additionally, your range is stronger than the blinds’ ranges, since they already have money in the pot and are forced to defend wider due to pot odds.

You can see that the GTO call range of the BB (above, in green) is wider than the GTO open range of the Button (below). It's also less polarized (it includes neither the best nor the worst hands).

And on top of that, recreational players tend to call too wide from the BB! Another reason why your range on the Button is stronger than theirs.

Above you can see the average hands recreational players tend to call with in the BB. As you can see, they defend a wider range than GTO.

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➡️ How to exploit this range advantage?

As mentioned earlier, it starts with a min-raise — not a limp — to immediately build the pot and apply pressure on the SB and BB.

Postflop: You’ll often want to continue the aggression with a c-bet (continuation bet) and sometimes with a second and third barrel if the situation allows. Since your range is stronger, you’ll have hands like KQ while your opponents will often have hands like K7. In other words, you’ll generally have the advantage on most flops and can frequently push your opponents to fold.

4. How wide can we open against 2 recreational players?

This is a valid question. You might think that, given our postflop edge and the fact that recreational players 3-bet very little, we could open almost any playable hand: K6o, T4s, etc.

But what is the reality?

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3-bet frequencies of recreational players, 25bb deep vs BTN open:

Position	GTO	Recreationals 🐟
BB	~16 %	~9 %
SB	~18 %	~7 %

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Hmm... interesting. The low 3-bet tendencies of recreational players seem to suggest we could open wider than GTO.

And yet, the reality is more nuanced.

We will use HRC to calculate the optimal BTN open range at 25bb, exploiting the actual preflop tendencies of recreational players (based on the table above), assuming perfect postflop play.

**HRC** is the solver we will use throughout these strategy guides to compute **Exploitative ranges**, adjusting for the differences between recreational player tendencies and GTO (open, call, etc.).

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Result: we get a BTN open range that is slightly wider than GTO, but not drastically so:

Here is the **Exploitative BTN open range at 25bb** calculated with HRC, factoring in recreational frequencies and assuming perfect postflop play.

This is why the Exploitative ranges in Spin Ranges are somewhat wider than GTO, but not excessively so:

Our Exploitative BTN open range at 20–25bb.

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The impact of postflop mistakes

In practice, in addition to not 3-betting enough preflop, recreational players play poorly postflop:

They make sizing errors, bad calls, donk bets, etc.

This increases the EV of all your hands, including those with low theoretical EV.

That’s why some slightly negative EV hands (up to -0.05) become +EV when playing against two recreational players.
We could therefore widen our BTN open range even more than the one shown above.

However, the gains remain marginal.

➡️   It’s up to you to decide how much you want to exploit your opponent (at the risk of opening too wide and potentially triggering a defensive reaction).

➕   Another reason not to widen your open range too much on the BTN: recreational players in the SB call too often. Against a player who defends almost everything, it’s better to avoid opening very weak hands like J7o.

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Conclusion of this section: the BTN ranges we propose represent a good balance. They effectively exploit recreational player tendencies without going to extremes.

5. Shove certain hands to maximize EV

❓ Why shove starting from 18bb with certain hands?

Simply because recreational players in SB and BB tend to call BTN all-ins too often with dominated hands: KJo, QTo, A5o...

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Call frequencies vs BTN shove (16–18bb):

Position	GTO	Recreationals 🐟
SB	~14 %	~20 %
BB	~16 %	~30 %

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Observation: Recreational players tend to overcall BTN shoves.

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➡️ How to exploit this tendency:

Hands like A7o+, 22–99 generate more EV when shoved than when min-raised, because they dominate the call ranges and are hard to play postflop if they miss.

👌   Shoving these hands means both exploiting opponent mistakes and avoiding tough postflop spots.

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However, there are also hands we prefer to min-raise — even though GTO open-shoves them.

BTN 14–16bb deep — Left: GTO version. Right: Exploitative version.

GTO builds a balanced open-shove range with medium Ax, suited broadways, small Ax, and small pairs.

But this approach is meant to protect the range against a perfect opponent, not to maximize EV vs average or weak players.

Against recreational players, this balance is unnecessary.

Since they tend to overcall shoves, it’s more profitable to min-raise hands like KTs, QJo, or A4s instead of shoving them.

For two reasons:

QTs, JTs, etc. — all those suited broadways that GTO shoves — actually play well postflop, especially against recreational players who will make many mistakes. Similarly, small Axs can hit flushes or straights.
Since recreational players call too much, if we shove A3s, we risk getting called by superior Ax (e.g. A5o).

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🤔   It’s a bit subtle. In our exploitative strategy, we choose to open shove certain hands that GTO doesn’t shove. These are hands that play poorly postflop but dominate the opponent’s calling range (e.g. A7o). Conversely, we choose not to shove certain hands — those that play well postflop and are likely to be called by better (e.g. A2s).

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As you can see, recreational players make many mistakes — but fully exploiting them is not trivial.

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📈How does this OS range evolve?

From 12bb, widen your shove range to include most of your Axs and KTo+.
From 10bb, only premium hands (TT+) should be min-raised, as they still achieve more EV this way.
From 8bb, the BTN range consists only of open shoves. But beware — the shove range is very narrow: you will fold many hands.

Strategic Guides

Strategic Guide

BTN (3-max)