Jared Devlin-Scherer

Poker isn't a game where we can come home from a session and know whether or not we are a winning player. It's not a game where we can come home from a week's worth of poker sessions, back to back, with no sleep, playing 12 tables online, and know whether or not we are a winning player.

You don't get variance. Sure you say you do. But you've probably played less then 100,000 hands of poker in your lifetime. Have you? And if you have, have you learned to stop getting pissed off every time the poker Gods come down and dump a -5 buyin downswing on your head? Losing confidence in your poker game or just getting pissed that you lost is a common result for a lot of players, including myself.

Its time to admit it, you don't completely understand variance in poker. You might understand the poker game rules, but you don't understand variance. If you did, you wouldn't get pissed. And by the end of this article series, I hope you can understand it. And hopefully get passed using your results as a sole indicator of your play.

Today we are going to discuss the different factors that effect how much you win everyday from session to session. You will hear a lot of players say: "I folded this draw to lower my variance" or "I didn't play the hand because I wanted to wait for a better spot". These are poker fallacies and only contribute to incorrect thinking and mistakes. Poker luck can be divided into different groups. There is luck at winning when the cards are turned face up, or outdraw luck. There is luck in the actual dealing of the cards themselves, or how the fuck did that fish get AA for the 300thtime this session luck.

There is even luck of the seat you get. In tournaments, home games, even online cash games you don't always get to choose the exact seat you want. Sometimes you get lucky and a good regular leaves a table and a huge fish sits down and donks off 5 stacks to you. That's just the way poker is.

We are going to learn how to ignore the luck that exists in poker and focus on the evaluation of your own poker play. Poker isn't a game where you can talk about outdraws all day and get better. People who do this are worse players for a reason, getting better at poker takes focus in the right directions. Some players are looser then others. Some players push draws harder then others. Does this really effect how much you win or lose in a given day? Yes, but only because these decisions are either +EV or -EV. Every time you push a draw in a spot where you shouldn't have or pass up pushing your opponent off a hand when you could, you lose money.

Let's just get this straight once and for all. All that matters is good decisions. The truth is, if you play in games with more aggressive players you will have more swings. In games where more players limp and players are less aggressive, especially with their made hands, you will have less variance. In games where every hand is 3-bet before the flop, where opponents force you to play in reraised pots and your edge is defined more by your early street play your variance will rise. At the end of the day, what decides how much you win is how good you are.

Your variance, or standard deviation (to use a stats term) can also be based on how aggressively you play. But does this mean you will win less? No. It means when you run bad, you are going to run worse. When you run well you are going to run better. Tighter players have more even results but that does not mean their results are better. If you play 100,000 online poker hands and run better then average someone with a larger standard deviation will have better results, but on the other hand if you run worse then average, a player with a smaller standard deviation will. Larger standard deviation means, you will run farther from your norm for longer but it does not mean you will make less money. It means when your swings are insignificant, how much you win will be unaffected. But if you have large up and large downswings given the luck you are dealt then a player who plays in more aggressive games or creates more aggressive situations with their own play will have different results in either a positive or negative direction.

Here are two examples of graphs of players with similar win rates and different standard deviations. The luck of these players in the given sample has been evened out using a randomization function in Microsoft Excel. Although imperfect at catching the luck of the deal, excel does a good job of showing us what is possible and what does effect how much you win:

Compare graphs #1 and #2. In graph #1 three players run badly. In graph #2 three players run well. Hands are of 3 players running at 4PTBB/100, over a 100,000 hand stretch, but with different standard deviations.

In graph #1 the yellow player wins the least but in graph #2 he wins the most. Why? Higher standard deviation means you win more when you run well but lose more when you run badly.T

he overall result is the same, over the long-term.

So what can we focus on to understand what makes us a winning and losing player? It's not whether you play draws, aggressively, whether you are tight or loose, all that matters is making good decisions. As you may have noticed in the above graphs the first group of players, running badly, won on average 1500 BB, or 15 buyins and the second group running well won around 6500BBs or 65 buyins.

These graphs aren't of players with different win rates, all they show is players who have different levels of standard deviation due to distinct styles! In the first set of graphs over 100,000 poker hands the players on average ended up making 50 buyins more! In our next article we will discuss the crazy variance associated with luck in poker and what you can actually expect as your swings as a winning and losing player.

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