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Hi guys, what is "variance"?
I've read about it but I'd probably understand it better from a real person..
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Its called a see-saw your happily going up and down then the good luck at the other end jumps off and you get "VARIANCE"
Your of on your Holiday and paid extra for 1st class Air flights ..... only to be told by people in the next seat they got up-graded from economy class. "Variance"
Your Boss treats everyone to the day off ........ but you have to work.!
Where's TK when you need him.?
Your questions seems to have been lost in a sea of unrelated stuff, so I'll try & explain variance in simple terms. Hopefully, I qualify as a "real person".
Technically, variance is when we run above or below expectation.
We'll use a nice easy example, & rounded numbers to make it easier.
Let's say we have A-A & our opponent has 7-7.
Mathematically, we are around 80% to win this hand.
Assuming we get it all-in pre-flop, & we play this exact same hand 1,000 times, we SHOULD, in theory, win it 800 times. The more times we run this same hand - say 10,000, or 100,000, the more likely we will win 80% of the time.
Now what happens of we take a sample size of one.
If we WIN the hand, for which we were an 80% shot, we are running ABOVE EXPECTATION. That's positive variance. We got lucky. We are running good.
If we LOSE the hand, for which we were an 80% shot, we are running BELOW expectation. That's negative variance. We are running bad.
For the maths to work out, we need a large sample size. So over 100,000 hands, we'll likely run EXACTLY to expectation. Over 10 hands, we will ALMOST NEVER run EXACTLY to expectation.
In a nutshell, that is variance. In effect, it's luck. Nothing wrong with getting A-A in v 7-7. If we lose it's bad luck. If 7-7 wins, it's good luck for him.
Over the long term, it all cancels itself out, all other things being equal.
When people hoot & holler that their Aces got beat by sevens last night, ra ra ra, they forget the times their sevens beat Aces. That's selective memory at work. Or, put another way, a bad loser, or someone who has no grasp of how maths work. 80% is not 100%.
In practice, in real life, I saw some extreme variance last night.
These 2 hands took place one minute apart in separate £11 PLO8 DYM's.
In the first hand, I had my man completely locked up - he had ONE out on the river & pinged it. I had to look twice, to see why the chips had gone across to him. I felt a little aggrieved - "how did he get there? sorta thing. No matter, move on.
A minute later, I got in in real bad, my K-K-x-x v Eon's A-A-2-3. It's hard to be in worse shape than that. On the flop, I got no help, but I hit runner runner backdoor flush & scooped.
There's both sides variance. I ran badly below expectation in the first example, hugely above expectation in the 2nd.
Run those 2 hands 10,000 times & they'll likely come out EXACTLY to expectation.
Hope that helps.
Word of warning. Many losing players blame "variance". They might be right, but it's often the case that they are not playing the hand correctly.
If we go back to our A-A v 7-7 scenario, the ods of 80% are PRE FLOP.
If we try to get cute, & limp into the pot to try & trap 7-7 man, then the odds change dramatically, as we give 7-7 man a chance to hit his 7. We also risk other players being in the hand, so our odds reduce again.
Well not as much fun.!
once you start to understand expectation and what you can and cant control it can not only improve your poker playing skill set, but also how much you enjoy the game. i'd argue that understanding variance can also filter in your 'real-life' away from the tables.
to expand upon the excellent posts by tikay:
why do poker players use the word variance as opposed to luck?
well i'd argue it is a much more dispassionate word. luck is emotive and is also a quality that we can assign to others and ourselves. we may view some people as lucky, and ourselves as unlucky. doing so is emotive. if we feel we are unlucky we can curse our luck or bemoan the jamminess of others.
however saying 'i've just been on the wrong side of variance' implies that you dont see yourself as being inherently more or less lucky than someone else, that you understand the distances from expectation in poker and also that the spell is only temporary [compared to if you see yourself as being inherently unlucky]
it also avoids percieved injustice where you dont win your 'fair' share or that villain didnt 'deserve' to win that pot. shedding these emotions will improve your enjoyment of the game. half the posters in this sub-forum seem to loath the game and themsleves [i am so unlucky, the game is so rigged, why do i bother]
no, you've experienced variance. we all experience variance. its inerent in the game, and indeed life.
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just how much variance there is in poker is often underestimated.
alll these things can compound on top of another and show up in your expected winrate. its not as simple as all-in luck.In a separate MTT, I beat AA and QQ with QT (ahem), then eventually bust when AA couldn't hold vs 55 on a 3 6 7 flop.
Swings and swongs.
the variance there can compound in unusual ways.
most obviously in prize pool distribution:
i can spin a hige prize pool win and i'll be over EV for life.
but what if i run bad in prize pool distribution?
what if i run good in prize pool distribution but run horribly in all-in EV in those big prize pools?
the HU portion of spins is by far the most profitable - its where most of your cEV per tournament comes from. so any run bad - be card distribution, coolers, all-in luck - that effects how often you get HU will expoentially effect your overall chip EV.
you are randomly assigned positions. over my last 1k games i have 20 more buttons than SB's 3 handed. given my bb/100 in the button towers over my bb/100 in the SB that will show up in my expected winrate, howver smalll that effect is.
you are randomly assigned tables. getting a table with two sick HUSNG players is going to kill my winrate esp compared to getting 2 new depositting players. getting the sickos in a big prize pool is going to hurt even more - but i might just run good.
so all these things can compound on top of each other, or cancel each other out.
there will be analogous effects for all game types.
understanding them will help you ride out the variance, good or bad.