Re: About Variance
 

Stellar Wind,

Another great post. I just wanted to highlight one thing you said.

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3. Aggressive hand protection. In theory you might be able to reduce variance by protecting your hand. You flop the best hand, they all fold, you reap a consistent flow of moderate-sized pots. Problem is, that's not the way LL poker usually works. Protecting your hand is something of a misnomer. What actually happens most of the time is they don't fold. They just pay whatever it takes and draw out their hands. Very profitable but the variance goes through the roof. You risk lots of extra bets to win bloated pots.


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Much is made of the need to "protect your hand". Like you said, often people won't fold regardless. Ed notes this in a footnote to SSHE I believe, but I like to think more about exploiting larger pot equity edges. You wait to raise on the turn, for example, not so much because it will get people to fold (and you may , in fact, want them to call when they are not getting proper odds) but because you can charge them more to draw, which, in all likelihood, they are going to do anyway. (And I am not talking about charging the flush draws in a big multiway pot; as as Ed Miller has pointed out, they generally make money on extra bets going in on the flop.) Of course, as you pointed out, this will increase variance.

Colgin