Ev of insurance (spin & gos)
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 681
So the gg network has introduced spin & gos called spin & gold, whose structure depend on the multiplier.
There is this feature called insurance that allows you to get your buyin back if you hit the 2x, but it costs an additional buy in to have (so one buyin for the game and one for the insurance). If you hit the 2x with insurance, you are freerolling the game to win a buyin.
You hit the 2x 46.5% of the time, but the 3x is also at a similar frequency, 44.4% of the time. If you hit the 3x (or any other multiplier) you lose your insurance buyin.
I was wondering what the ev of this thing is.
Assuming an average winrate would it be
.535 * (-1) + 0.465 *(1/3)?
And thus making it a significantly -ev proposition.
Join Date: Apr 2010
Posts: 13,624
safe to say no form of insurance is in your favor
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 681
The network has some variance reduction features that are pretty good, like running it multiple times in cash games and all in insurance every time you're all in as a favorite in a heads up pot, where you pay a fee to insure against however many of your opponents outs you want. They don't charge vig in either of those cases as far as I know (think they just round it in their favor for the cash game insurance thing).
But for this spin and gold insurance, it seems highway robbery at an ev of -0.38 buy ins per game, unless I am missing something in my calculation above.
Join Date: Aug 2015
Posts: 5,678
EV would be . 535-0.465 = -.07 buyins per insurance wager or 7% house edge. Your winrate doesn’t matter because insurance is independent of the result of the game. It only depends on the outcome of the spin.