Managing Poker Swings: Bankroll, Variance & Where to Play
Poker is a game of probabilities, so there can be certain periods when bad players run like gods and win a lot of money. At the same time, excellent players can face periods when they seem to find the top of their opponents’ range every single time and run into one bad beat after another.
Variance is like a playful dog on a leash
Variance is present in every poker player’s life, whether they are aware of it or not. There are certainly ways to reduce it, but it will always be there to some degree, so it’s worth being prepared to manage it well.
The easiest way to think of it is like walking a dog that moves around a lot. The dog is running left and right (upswing and downswing), but the leash is in the owner’s hand (EV). During the dog walk, if you capture just a moment, you might see the dog walking in a completely different direction (short term) than the owner, but for the walk as a whole (long term) the dog is still going the same way as her owner.
It is of course possible to “shorten the leash”, i.e. reduce the size of the swings. The bigger the edge you have on your opponents, the smaller the fields you play, and the slower the games you play, the smaller your swings will be. Conversely, in many cases, smaller fields and slower games also mean significantly lower hourly rates.
Which Sites and Formats Have the Smallest Swings?
“Shorten the leash” is easy to say, harder to act on. Here’s what actually moves the needle, in order of impact.
Format: stack depth matters more than you’d think. Standard Expresso (25bb) and Expresso Nitro (15bb) don’t just differ in speed, they differ in how much variance you’re signing up for. Nitro’s shallower stacks mean faster all-ins and less room to play your way out of a bad spot postflop. Expresso’s deeper stacks give you more control over pot size and more opportunities to out-decision an opponent rather than out-run them. If swings are what’s wearing you down, dropping from Nitro to standard Expresso is one of the simplest changes you can make, even though it costs you some volume.
Site: softer pools swing less, even at the same format. A tougher field doesn’t just cost you cEV, it also means your edge is thinner, and a thin edge needs a bigger bankroll to survive the same downswing. Sites and player pools with a higher share of recreational players let you build a real cEV cushion, which shrinks the practical size of your swings even if the underlying math doesn’t change.
EV pools: a separate lever entirely. Format and site choice change how much variance you generate. An EV pool changes how much of that variance you actually feel. By pooling results across a group, the gap between your $EV and your real winnings narrows fast, because one player’s bad month gets offset by another’s good one. This is the single biggest swing-reducer available to a serious player, and it works independently of whatever format or site you’ve chosen.
None of these are free. Slower formats mean lower volume. Softer pools sometimes mean sacrificing site perks like rakeback. Pooling means sharing more than just your losses. But if variance is the problem you’re trying to solve, this is the order to think about it in: format first, site second, EV protection third.
The dreaded downswing
Losing money in a session sucks. The only thing worse than that is a string of losing sessions lasting for weeks, possibly months. However, encountering a downswing is inevitable for everyone who plays poker at least somewhat seriously. How you handle it will have a big impact on how successful you can be as a poker player.
If you can look a bit further than the red fog after the continuous bad luck, you can see, that variance is on your side if you take poker seriously. Running good is the carrot on the stick, that keeps bad players around. And you can be sure, that not a lot of bad players can draw a line and stop playing when they start losing, most of them going to give it all back when the time comes and then some more. But you have to stick around to take advantage of them.
Let’s talk numbers
A lot of our players play Expressos on Winamax, so we have a pretty good understanding of the possible swings there: (the numbers are from €5 and €10)
3K games played/ month : you have 50% chance, that you are going to experience a 125 BI downswing in the month and a 25% chance you are going to experience a 175 BI downer
10K games played/ month : you have 50% chance, that you are going to experience a 250 BI downswing in the month, and 25% of the time you are going to experience a 350 BI downer (fun times)
Let’s keep in mind, that these are statistics from winning players, if someone is new to spin games, this could get even uglier. Extremely fast games with shallow stacks are not for the faint of heart, but on the other hand, they can be extremely profitable if played the right way.
Bankroll Swings: How Much Buffer Do You Actually Need?
The numbers above aren’t just interesting, they’re a bankroll requirement in disguise.
If you’re playing 3K games a month, you need to be prepared for a 125 BI downswing half the time, and a 175 BI downswing a quarter of the time. That’s not a worst-case scenario, that’s a coin flip. If your bankroll can’t absorb a 175 BI hit without you tilting, moving down, or stopping altogether, it’s too small for the volume you’re playing.
Scale up to 10K games a month and the buffer you need scales with it: 250 BI half the time, 350 BI a quarter of the time. More volume doesn’t just mean more variance in absolute terms, it means you need a meaningfully bigger cushion to play through it without your decision-making changing.
A simple way to think about it: whatever downswing number applies to your monthly volume, that’s roughly the minimum bankroll you should have in reserve just to keep playing your normal game through a bad month. Anything less, and a statistically unremarkable downswing can force decisions that have nothing to do with your actual skill level, dropping stakes, cutting volume, or chasing losses.
And remember what these numbers already told you: they come from winning players. If you’re newer to spin games and still building your sample, plan for worse, not better.
This is also where a professional team or an EV pool changes the math entirely. Instead of carrying the full 350 BI swing yourself, that risk gets spread across a group. It doesn’t make the swing smaller in a vacuum, but it makes the personal bankroll you need to survive it dramatically smaller.
Minimize the effects of downswings
It’s a bit paradoxical, but just because you have a downswing doesn’t mean you are not a winning player anymore. But if you dwell too much on it and stop doing the things that made you a winning poker player in the first place it can really take a toll on your game and mental well-being.
The first question you should ask yourself may sound a bit silly, but it’s important to be clear. Are you a winning player? Of course, if you already have a big enough sample size, you can easily answer this. But if you haven’t been playing for long and happened to start your poker career with an upswing, you may have a distorted picture of what your current capabilities are.
This is a time to be disciplined, take your game apart, and even better if someone can help you with that. You can ask someone more experienced than you to look at your game and your stats. It can also be helpful to join a stable to help you get a realistic view of your game.
When things look grim, it’s way easier to let the structures in your life fall apart. But this is the time when you need to keep up with your habits at the tables and apart from it as well. Make sure to wake up on time, eat properly and take some time for exercise. It’s not rocket science, especially if you’ve been playing poker for a while, but it’s pretty easy to go into a slump if you are running badly.
If you have a set number of games you have to play a day, make sure you do it. In case you don’t have a set number yet, then figure one out, it’s extremely important if you want to take poker seriously.
The sunny side of variance
Only worse hands call you in a preflop all-in and you miraculously hold. You manage to flop a monster hand almost every time or your draw gets there on the river like clockwork. This is it, finally, you are where you wanted to be for so long. The poker gods have rewarded you for all your efforts. From now on everything will be fine, that’s the new norm. Or is it?
Of course, it would be wonderful if from now on you could make a profit in every session every day, but unfortunately, this is not the reality. The same fact that can help with a downswing is just as true for an upswing: it will end sooner or later.
Spin & Go Variance in cEV Terms
Everything above describes what an upswing feels like. Here’s how to tell if it’s real.
The number that actually matters is cEV (chip EV per game). It strips out the luck in your all-ins and multiplier draws and tells you how good your decisions actually were, independent of how the cards landed. This is the industry-standard way to separate skill from variance, and it’s the only honest answer to “am I actually a better player now, or am I just running hot?”
The catch is that cEV needs volume before it means anything. At 25bb (standard Expresso), your true win rate sits within roughly ±9 cEV of your observed rate over 10,000 games, at 95% confidence. Drop to 1,000 games and that margin balloons to around ±28 cEV. At 15bb (Nitro), the picture tightens faster: ±3 cEV over 15,000 games, widening to roughly ±7 cEV at 3,000 games.
What this means in practice: if you’re a few hundred games into a heater, your cEV sample is still mostly noise. The upswing might be telling you something real about a leak you fixed or an adjustment that’s working. Or it might be telling you nothing at all. You won’t know which until the sample catches up.
This is why the advice in the next section isn’t “stop and celebrate”, it’s “keep playing your normal volume and let the sample decide.” An upswing that holds up once your cEV stabilizes is a real signal. One that doesn’t is just the dog running left for a while before it goes back to matching its owner’s pace.
What to do when the gods of poker smile at you?
An upswing is an opportunity to take a shot at… your education. A few might think that this is the perfect time to take a shot at higher stakes, but the overconfidence that comes with being on the better side of variance can quickly melt a handsome bankroll into nothing. With education, you will be able to lower your variance and experience smaller swings and eventually move up the stakes with proper knowledge and confidence.
The second biggest thing to remember is that every single upswing will eventually come to an end. Sooner or later your heater will stop. If you became lazy with your game because, well, you are printing anyways, you are in for a rude awakening.
Keeping up with your daily routine and not falling behind on the number of games you play is extremely important. Without consistency and sticking to your plan through thick and thin, you are just a recreational player, not a professional who plays for a living. The upswing is going to end eventually, so don’t let yourself go lazy.
If you need some help improving your game and keeping yourself accountable or you just want to try another type of game, we might have the solution for you.
Our 30-day commitment-free trial period will give you the knowledge you need to become a winning player in spin games.
After 30 days if you like it, you can join our team and the sky’s the limit, if not, at least you’ve given it a shot and you know it’s not for you.
