A Question on Rushes and Standard Deviation

[tempest7178]

After reading Mason Malmuth's Essay "A Look at Rushes: Part 1" in Poker Essays Vol. 2 I was fascinated by the ability to measure short term luck. I tried to apply this to an idea proposed by my friend. He would like to stay at 2/4 and 8 table instead of moving up in the ranks. He sees it as a relatively risk free way of easily building up the bankroll as well as accumulating a fair amount of cash. I have wanted to see if this idea works out.

Mason Malmuth says that a typical 20-40 expert that can beat the 20-40 Vegas game for 1 Big Bet an hour should expect a standard deviation of $500 or 12.5 BB an hour. Results will be contained within 3 standard deviations or 37.5 BB an hour which means the expert could be a $1540 winner or a $1460 loser. He writes that this should happen approximately 3 times every 1000 hours.

My Question:

Now, in trying to relate this to 2/4 at Party I assumed that the Standard Deviation of 12.5 BB an hour would remain the same. (Should it? How do you adjust this for a much weaker game?) Assuming we can beat the 2/4 game for 2 BB an hour (we hope to beat it for more) and play 8 tables at once, that is $64 an hour. I treated this $64 simply as "1 Big Bet." So the standard deviation is $800 and we can expect to win or lose anywhere from +$2400 to -$2336 3 times every 1000 hours of live play. I calculated that an hour of online play 8-tabling is the equivalent of 12 hours of live play. 60 hands per hour as opposed to 40 hands per hour live as well as the 8 tables at once. So this means that a swing as large as +2400 to -2336 should happen 3 times every 83 hours of 8 tabling online. Or, if we were to average 20 hours of play a week, once every 1.3 weeks.

This seems like quite the roller coaster ride. I didn't think 8 tables of 2/4 could theoretically get this wacky. Is my thinking wrong here? How do you adjust the standard deviation for very soft games? My friend was hoping to be able to play approximately 20 hours a week for 50 weeks and in a years time have made around $60,000-$70,000. I thought it sounded like a pretty easy way (although rather time intensive) of making a lot of cash without the added stress of dealing with "tough" competition. Does anyone see anything wrong with this thinking? Also, is is there any way that the softness factor in 2/4 (ie. people check-calling with the nuts on the river, has happened to me twice while playing a total of 1000 hands at 2/4) make it worth staying at over trying this out at 3/6?

[pzhon]

The standard deviation scales as the square root of the number of hands played, not linearly. Playing 9 tables of 2-4 produces variations about the size that 1 table of 6-12.

If 40 hands of 2-4 is worth 4+-50, then 480 hands of 2-4 is worth 48+-173.