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The goal of this Getting Started in Spin in 2025 course is to give you a general overview of the format and to provide you with the first essential tools you’ll need to start out.
These resources are not designed to make you instantly “crush” Spins, but rather to help you understand the key fundamentals before diving in.
They are aimed at all players who want to seriously get into Spins (Expressos, Spin & Go, Spin & Gold…) — whether you already have a little experience in the format or not.
This kind of content is quite rare online (if not completely absent, to be honest), and it’s available here entirely for free.
This series will be divided into 3 parts, each covering a key aspect of grinding in this format.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me at: contact@pokersciences.com
Enjoy the reading!
Let’s start with the very first question: Is this format even beatable over the long term? To answer that, I’ll take a twofold approach.
First, I’ll share my personal experience as a player. Then I’ll give you a more theoretical breakdown of the format based on calculations I’ll walk you through.
A lot of us start playing Spin & Go casually — a quick game between two tournaments or while having coffee. And of course, we usually lose more than we win… but sometimes we hit a few nice runs that make us believe this format might actually be profitable.
And then, most of the time, we end up losing everything and conclude that Spins are mostly just luck. After all, the games feel so fast and random...
Over time, I became frustrated with MTTs. The tournaments were long, and losing everything on a flip during a crucial moment felt incredibly frustrating.
That’s why one evening, I decided to play only Spin & Go— I started at the €0.50 level on Winamax.
I remember that night vividly — I got super lucky, was making ridiculous 4x opens on the button, and it worked out. I probably won 20 buy-ins — I can’t remember exactly. I felt like I had discovered a “hack” for winning Spins.
I was so hyped, already calculating how much I could make if I did that every night!
I genuinely believed I had found an easy way to consistently win at Spin & Go. But reality hit me hard the very next day. Within an hour, I had almost lost everything. What I thought was skill turned out to be luck: winning flips, favorable spots, good multipliers, etc.
That’s when I asked myself the question every Spin player should ask: Can you really win at Spin & Go? And if so, how much?
Before we talk about real money earnings, it’s crucial to understand the inner workings of Spin & Go.
The first thing to determine is whether, in the long run, it’s possible to win more chips than your opponents.
In Spin & Go, you play with relatively short stacks, generally between 0 and 25 big blinds. Your stack constantly fluctuates depending on the different phases of the game. You might go from 12–25bb to 6–12bb, or even below 6bb at any moment.
Whatever your stack size, your goal is always to make the best decisions possible to accumulate chips over time. And to evaluate this profitability, we use a metric called EV (Expected Value).
EV is a key indicator that tells us whether our decisions are profitable.
In the following graphs, I’ll share EV curves from hands I’ve played, broken down by three stack depths: 12–25bb, 6–12bb, and less than 6bb.
This will allow us to clearly see how EV translates in Spin & Go games, regardless of your stack size, from the perspective of a winning player.
Indeed, playing with 20 big blinds is very different from playing with 6: the ranges, strategies (push, fold, min-raise...), and the impact of variance all change.By looking at the EV curve at each stack depth separately (to be more precise, we should say “effective stack size”), we can better identify how many chips you can expect to win depending on whether you're playing short-stacked or deep-stacked.
f the green curve is below the yellow one, it means you’ve won fewer chips than expected — you’ve been unlucky when going all-in.
Conversely, if the green curve is above the yellow one, it means you’ve won more chips than expected.
Let’s start with EV when the effective stack is between 12 and 25bb:
Next, the EV for stacks between 6 and 12bb:
And finally, the EV for stacks between 0 and 6bb:
You can see from the graphs that no matter my stack size, I consistently manage to win a significant number of chips.
Even when my stack is very short (between 0 and 6bb), I still maintain an edge over my opponents — which shows that it’s possible to be competitive even in more fragile scenarios with low stack sizes.
The key takeaway here is that in Spins, a well-executed strategy can ensure that you’re the one winning more chips over the long run, even when you're short-stacked and it feels like luck is the only factor.
Of course, this chip gain/loss dynamic doesn’t yet tell us whether the edge is big enough to cover the rake — the fee the site takes from each tournament (we’ll get back to that in the next chapter). But what it already proves is that winning chips consistently is absolutely possible, even in low-stack situations, as long as you're applying the right strategies.
We’ll go into detail about the rake later on, but for now, it’s already clear:If you’re winning more chips than your opponents, you’re heading in the right direction.
To answer the question on “Is it possible to win more chips than your opponents in Spin & Go?" — the answer is clearly YES.
→ You can have a real advantage over your opponents, even with very short stacks.
Now, let’s dive into a deeper analysis that will confirm this long-term profitability.
