Winnings, EV, showdown and rake curves: reading your progress

A chart that goes up is nice to look at. But a chart that goes up tells you nothing about the quality of your play if you don't know what it's made of. A month of positive winrate can hide a real edge that got fed to variance on a handful of coolers, or it can just as easily mask a genuine edge underneath a run of bad luck. Without decomposing the curve, you can't tell which one you're actually looking at.

GrindLab's tracker Stats page plots 5 distinct curves over the same hand history: your actual winnings, your all-in EV, your showdown share, your non-showdown share, and the rake you paid. Each answers a different question. Here's how to read them together to separate variance from edge, and figure out where your profit actually comes from.

The 5 curves, at a glance

Before digging into each one, here's what each curve measures and the question it answers.

All 5 read the same imported hand history, the one you brought in through My Hands. They just don't tell the same story about it.

BB or native currency: two readings, one dataset

Every curve can be read in BB (big blinds) or in native currency (€ or $), via a toggle at the top of the page.

In BB, your curves stay comparable across stakes. If you moved up from NL10 to NL50 during the month, your currency curve will spike mechanically even if your game hasn't changed: that's a stake effect, not an edge effect. Reading in BB neutralizes that and ties directly into BB/100 winrate, the standard unit for comparing performance over time or across players.

In currency, you see the real impact on your bankroll: what you can withdraw, what you need to report, what a session is actually worth. Both views are useful, they just answer different questions: BB to judge your game, currency to judge your account.

A quick example makes the point. Say you played 20,000 hands at NL10 and then 20,000 more at NL50 after moving up. In currency, the second half of the curve will look far steeper even at an identical winrate, purely because each big blind is worth five times more. Switch to BB and the two halves flatten out to the same slope, which is the honest picture of whether your actual edge changed when you moved up in stakes.

Winnings vs all-in EV: the variance signal

This is the most useful comparison on the page, and the most commonly misread.

The winnings curve plots what actually happened: the cards fell, you won or lost the pot. The all-in EV curve plots something different: every time money went in all-in before the hand finished, it calculates your exact equity at that moment and accumulates that instead of the real board outcome. It's the same expected value concept used in the Lab to evaluate a decision: the average result over many repetitions, not the result of this one instance.

The gap between the two curves is your all-in variance:

• Winnings above EV: you won more than your equity predicted. You ran good on your all-ins.
• Winnings below EV: you won less than expected. You ran bad, even if your decisions were correct.

Here's the important part, and the one that's usually misread: this gap is not a judgment on how well you played. A player can push an all-in with 80% equity and still lose it one time in five over the long run. That's not a mistake, that's variance doing its job. What actually judges your play is the slope of the EV curve itself, not the gap between the two lines. An EV curve that climbs steadily, even with jagged real winnings bouncing around it, is the sign of an edge that exists independent of how the cards fell.

The calculator above applies the same principle to a single decision: it compares the expected value of a call or a push against its possible binary outcomes. The tracker's EV curve does the same thing, cumulated over hundreds or thousands of hands.

Showdown vs non-showdown: where the money comes from

Once you know whether you're actually winning (the EV curve), the next question is how.

The showdown curve accumulates winnings from hands you took all the way to showdown, where your hand was compared against the opponent's. The non-showdown curve accumulates winnings from hands where the opponent folded before the end, without ever showing their cards.

The read is direct:

• Showdown-heavy: your profit comes mostly from hands you showed down. You're winning by having the best hand at the end, which points to an edge built on value and hand selection rather than raw aggression.
• Non-showdown-heavy: your profit comes mostly from opponent folds. You're winning by getting people to fold before showdown, which points to an edge built on aggression and fold equity.

Neither profile is inherently better, but knowing yours changes what you should watch. A non-showdown-heavy player is more exposed if opponents stop folding: it's worth checking whether the profit holds up against calling stations. A showdown-heavy player depends more on range reading and preflop selection: a dip in the showdown curve can flag hands played too wide. To dig into a specific session and see which hands swung one curve or the other, go back to My Hands and replay the key spots in the Lab, or check your full history through tracking your sessions.

The rake curve: the cost that never stops

Rake isn't a decision, it's a systematic cut. The rake curve accumulates what you've paid, hand by hand, regardless of how you played.

It's worth tracking for two reasons. First, because it eats into your real winrate: a winnings curve that climbs at a decent pace can hide a disappointing net winrate once rake is subtracted, especially at lower stakes where rake weighs proportionally heavier. Second, because it informs structural decisions: switching rooms, formats (cash game vs tournament), or stakes has a direct impact on this curve, independent of any actual improvement in your game. Comparing its slope between two rooms you actually grind often tells you more than a theoretical rake comparison based on published rake tables.

A rake curve climbing fast relative to the winnings curve is a signal: either you're playing a lot of low-edge hands, or the stake or room is no longer optimal for your volume.

Reading all 5 curves together

Taken in isolation, each curve answers one specific question. Taken together, they tell a complete story:

1. Winnings: what actually happened.
2. All-in EV: whether that reflects a real edge or just variance.
3. Showdown / non-showdown: where that edge comes from.
4. Rake: how much it costs to generate it.

A month where winnings and EV climb together, with a stable showdown share and manageable rake, is a readable month: the winrate is real and you know where it comes from. A month where winnings spike but EV stays flat is a month not to overread: the run good will pass, EV is what remains.

That's the whole point of tracking these curves over time rather than reading a single snapshot, as part of the broader GrindLab tracker: they smooth out the noise of any one session and surface the underlying trend, the one that actually matters for judging your level.

Conclusion

A single winnings curve is never enough to judge a performance: it inseparably mixes your play with the randomness of the cards. The 5 curves on the Stats page split those factors apart. All-in EV isolates your real edge from all-in variance. The showdown/non-showdown split reveals where that profit comes from. Rake quantifies the fixed cost running in the background.

Three habits to build when you open the Stats page:

1. Always check EV before raw winnings to judge whether your edge is real.
2. Compare showdown and non-showdown to see what's carrying your profit, and whether it would hold up against a different opponent style.
3. Don't ignore the rake curve, it weighs on your net winrate on every single hand.

Open the Stats page on your recent history, toggle between BB and currency, and look at where the gap between your winnings and your EV sits. It's often the first thing that puts a hot or cold streak back into perspective.