Variance is the difference between how much money you expect to win on average over the long run and the results you are seeing in the short term. So for example, if according to your win rate you expect to win $500 in a month on average but end up losing $1,000 instead, this is attributed to variance. Examples of variance in poker. Although it's nice to live in the moment, poker is a long-term game and for the impact of variance to be watered down to the point where it's not skewing your results, you need to play a lot of sessions. Let's take a look at what we mean by variance. In concrete terms variance is the statistical distribution of results over a long period of time.

1. Variance In Live Poker Deuces Wild
2. Variance In Live Poker Odds
3. Variance In Live Poker Tournaments
4. Variance In Live Poker Games

Do you get frustrated playing poker tournaments? You play all the time and it seems like you never cash. And even when you do, you cash the minimum. Every once in a while you get teased with a deep run only to run Kings into Aces – resulting in another broken mouse.

Well as you gain experience, you learn that in order to be successful as a poker player you need to get comfortable with running bad. This is even more prevalent if you are a poker tournament specialist. But no matter how experienced you are, these bad runs can test you and make you question your skill level. This is especially true if you are an amateur poker player who only plays a handful of tournaments a week. You can actually go months without cashing and this duration of time in between cashes can skew your view of reality and affect your play.

Now if you read enough poker forums and websites you will hear about all the online tournament pros who are regularly taking down five and six-figure cashes. They paint this picture of guys constantly making final tables and raking in mounds of cash. You may even be a bit jealous and wonder, “what do those guys have that I don’t?” Well, I’m hoping this article will help answer that question and provide some much needed perspective on the topics of volume and variance.

Amateur Poker Players vs. Pros

Amateurs – For the purpose of this article, an amateur player is someone who plays about 1-3 times per week, usually at night. They have a “real job” and may have a family or are in college full time, so they can only put in part-time hours. But make no mistake, this player is serious about the game and spends time on poker forums, watching training videos, etc. Since we’re talking about tournament poker, the amateur in this article plays mostly large field no-limit hold’em tournaments. They may be a winning player, break even or maybe a slight loser in the game thus far in their career.

Pros – A professional is someone who plays online poker for their sole source of income. For this article, we are using those who specialize in large field online poker tournaments.

The Stats

Before reading too deep into these numbers, keep in mind that the purpose of this article is to provide perspective into your own results by comparing them to the results of other players. It is not meant to be a scientific study.

The numbers below represent an average of 10 players from each category and use results from both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars from 2010. The pro stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 8/22/10 and the amateur stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 9/20/10. They only include tournaments with over 180 players.

* Pro stats were taken from a ranking of the top 10 online tournament players. Amateur stats were taken from a sample of 10 amateur players who volunteered their screen name for use in this study.

**Avg. Played/Day is based on a 5 day week, but also only includes playing 2 sites. Actual volume per day may be larger for those who play more than 2 sites and less than 5 days a week.

What Do These Stats Mean?

As you can see, the pros are not these mythical beasts who cash all the time and final table every tournament. Media attention can sometimes give off a false reality as it only highlights their wins and never mentions how many losses it took to get there.

The realities are:

• Even the top pros only win tournaments less than 1% of the time. For some it was as low as 0.60%. So this means they are winning only 1 out of every 100 times. Of course variance doesn’t always come on schedule and they can go 200-300 tournaments without a win.
• Top pros only final table around 3% of the time. Some are as low as 2%.
• Top pros are only cashing about 13% of the time. This means they lose money 87% of the time they play! In fact, amateurs cash more often than pros. The difference is that when pros do cash, they cash deep more often.
• Pros have massive downswings like everyone else. In fact, becasue of the volume they play, they have had longer non-cash streaks.

Why have the pros averaged a $400,000 profit this year before September? It is in their ability to close tournaments. There is a reason why their ROI is 58% higher. Let’s look at the stats:

• Pros make 1/3 more final tables than amateur poker players.
• At a 9 person final table, the average of hitting top 3 should be 33%. Pros are hitting this 43.61% of the time.
• Of the times they cash, pros are final tabling almost twice as often as amateurs (23.9% compared to 12.8%).
• Pros finish in the top 3 almost 3x as often as amateurs.
• Volume, volume, volume. Let’s not forget that pros play all day, every day. This is their job. They have a distinct advantage of overcoming bad variance much quicker and also seeing “the long run” of making profitable decisions quicker.

Keep in mind that the group of amateurs used were volunteers from various poker forums. While not all were winning players, the fact that they study the game says they likely have better results than an average amateur. Also, because of their volume size an individual amateur’s skills may be better or worse than their results show.

Improving Your Game

How can you use these stats to improve your game?

Add More Tables

Get outside of your 1-3 tabling comfort zone and simply add a couple more tables. I know the argument is that it’s harder to make reads, but the volume you put in will make up for that. In addition, this extra volume means you are playing more hands and will result in improving your game even faster. This extra experience will more than make up for the short-term loss of a perfect read.

Play More Days

Just try to add 1 more day per week. Don’t be lazy. If you currently play 7 tournaments a day, adding 1 more day x 52 weeks = 364 more tournaments/year. Even at the amateur ROI average above of 20% and average buy-in of $30, that means an extra $2,184 in profit.

Stop Caring About Individual Tournaments

It’s easy to expend emotional energy in any single poker tournament. You’re trying to win of course. But the odds are that you’re not going to. In fact, you’re only going to cash about 15% of the time. All you can do is focus on making good decisions and the variance will work itself out in the end.

Play for the Win

There’s a reason why amateurs cash more than pros. They care more about it and tighten up near the bubble. But you will miss out on valuable opportunities to accumulate chips if you are playing just to cash. In addition, you can’t fear busting or making a mistake when you get deep. In order to make real money playing poker tournaments, you have to trust your instincts and play to win.

If you’ve ever grown frustrated playing poker tournaments, don’t sweat it. Keep in perspective that even the best players in the world don’t win that often. The only way to balance out negative variance is to put in enough volume where your skill can prevail.

Good luck at the tables.

By Donovan Panone

Donovan started playing poker in 2004 and is an experienced tournament and cash game player who has a passion for teaching and helping others improve their game.

1. Great, revealing article. Stats like these are very encouraging. Thanks, Donovan

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Variance:The Bane of Every Poker Player's Life

The fact or quality of being different, divergent, or inconsistent”

As soon as I first picked up the game back in 2005 it was obvious just how painful my relationship with luck was going to be if I ever wanted to play this game for a living. Looking back from today I really had no idea just how bad things could possibly get. Come to think of it, neither did the entire poker community!

My first poker experience came through online MTTs, and the standard advice back in the day was for professionals to have at least one hundred tournament buy ins in their bankroll. Little did we know that this was to prove way too cavalier. Especially as the games became tougher and tougher.

Variance In Live Poker Deuces Wild

These days people are now more likely to suggest at least three hundred buy ins for tournaments, and at least fifty buy ins for NL cash games, with PLO needing even more. This is not conservative either, it's supposed to be a basic minimum.

I can say for certain now, as an eleven year veteran of the game that variance is still not understood by the vast majority of casual players. The main problem being that they are not able to play the volume required to ride through the swings in reasonable time, with a downswing lasting months,maybe years rather than weeks for cash game players. Recreational live tournament players will possibly not even manage to play enough over the rest of their lives to get any kind of an accurate understanding of just how good they are.

So how can we better understand the variance we can expect to experience?

What Does a Variance Calculator Do Exactly?

The calculator is a tool which can simulate millions of hands or tournaments, and scientifically show us the results from a best case scenario to the worst case.

It is never going to prove anything with one hundred percent certainty, but it will show us close enough to suit our purposes giving us an idea of just how much luck is involved, and what kind of time scale is involved to play through an average downswing.

By inputting various statistics from our database we will also be able to see over a particular sample size what percentage of the time we can expect to be in profit. Along with advice on required bankroll size to stay within a reasonable risk of ruin percentage.

In today's tougher games, much is being said about how the mental game side of poker is becoming more important to maximize your results.

The Cash Game Variance Calculator

The best application out there today looks to be here.

Let's take a look at how the cash game calculator works.

Here I want to use as an example a recreational player who works full time so only finds time for 25000 hands per month. This player has a decent win rate of 2.5BB/100. Not to be confused with BB/100 which is twice the BB/100 that you need to enter.

Here we can see some samples showing that even being a decent player, over a small sample size of 25000 hands there's still a fairly high chance of losing money.

There is also a report showing some useful metrics.

As we can see from all this data, 25000 hands for many casual players can take quite a long time to play, and even if they know they are decent enough to win well in the games they play in, there is still a high chance of being down money.

Variance In Live Poker Odds

The Tournament Variance Calculator

The best application out there today looks to be here.

Even new players to the game who read about poker, and study the game to any extent will likely have heard about the extreme variance experienced by MTT players.

In this example our hero is a recreational player who finds time for 1500 tournaments in a year.

HisROI % is a healthy 35%, but nothing spectacular. He plays only $5 buy in events with an average of five thousand entrants. Each tournament pays out prizes to the top fifteen percent of finishers.

Here we can see that there is roughly a twenty five percent chance that he will be down money at the year's end. Fifty percent of the time he can expect to have won more than $2285, with the worst case being a total loss of more than $3400.

Can you imagine what an unprepared casual player would be thinking if they had lost $3400? This is why we need to do this work away from the table.

Variance In Live Poker Tournaments

Here is a random selection of twenty samples. As you can see there is still the possibility of going on a huge heater and making a nice profit. But there's no guarantees!

Variance In Live Poker Games

Similar to the cash game calculator we also get a detailed chart of statistical data.

Conclusion

In both examples we saw a competent player stand a fairly high chance of losing money over a single month,and over a full year.

Once you have experimented with different permutations you may even wish to change your game of choice. One point which stands out more than any other is how live poker players need the patience of a saint. They simply cannot look at poker in terms of months. Even for the professionals only hardcore cash game grinders can expect to feel a degree of certainty after a year's play. Live MTT players can expect a long wait, there just aren't enough days in the week.

For online players the long run can come around much sooner, but for those of you with jobs and family commitments it can still be a frustratingly long time before you see the fruits of your labor.

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