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In a €1 Spin, we’ve seen that the winner doesn’t receive an average of €3 (1€ from each of the 3 players, including themselves), but rather €2.79, since part of the buy-in is taken as rake by the site.
Let’s assume all three players are of equal skill and have a 33% chance of winning. Their expected value (EV) would be calculated as follows:
Explanation: To calculate EV, we take the profit (2.79€ in case of a win minus the 1€ buy-in, i.e., 1.79€), multiply it by the win probability (1 in 3, or 0.33), then subtract the losses (1€) multiplied by the probability of losing (2 out of 3, or 0.66).
That gives us an expected value of -0.07€.
Now let’s calculate how often you need to win to offset the rake (i.e., reach an EV of €0):
Résultat : With a 7% rake, you need to win at least 35.8% of the time to break even.
But... it’s actually a bit more complicated.
The money collected from all players is redistributed across various jackpots, including the highest multipliers. So to reach that 35.8% breakeven point, you would have to hit all jackpots in the exact theoretical proportions — including the rarest.
Let’s imagine you play 1 billion games: with a 35.8% win rate, as we just calculated, you would be breakeven (meaning an EV of €0).
ut if you play only 10,000 games, you’ll likely never hit a 1000x jackpot, for instance.
We therefore need to adjust our calculation to account for the fact that we will probably never hit the biggest jackpots.
This is why regular players calculate what’s called effective rake.
Instead of assuming a standard 7% rake, they compute a higher "realistic" rake assuming they’ll never hit the rare high jackpots.
This lets them figure out the actual ITM they need to be profitable without counting on huge multipliers — they treat those as pure bonuses.
Let’s calculate the effective rake for Winamax and Betclic:
We’ll exclude the highest jackpots (Winamax’s 1000x and 100,000x, and Betclic’s 1000x), because you’d need to play an enormous volume to have a decent chance at hitting them.
On Winamax, removing the biggest jackpots gives us an effective rake of: 8.6%
On Betclic, the effective rake is: 7.16%
As you can see, the effective rake is higher on Winamax (8,6%), making its structure less favorable compared to Betclic (7,16%).
Using the effective rake, we can now determine the real ITM needed to be profitable on each site. (We’ll skip the detailed calculations here, but feel free to redo them using the information above.)
Here’s what we get:
In theory, over a huge sample, beating the 7% rake means hitting an ITM of at least 35.8%.
In practice, you won’t hit the biggest jackpots often enough.
As a result, you'll need a higher ITM to be profitable.
That required ITM depends on each site’s jackpot structure:
→ 36.5% on Winamax,
→ 35.9% on Betclic.
This means it’s easier to win money on some platforms than others.
