Something to help others with variance
 

After finally playing over 150,000 hands between 1/2 to 5/10 my brain has come to accept the facts of how variance affects the game. I decided to do a little math and write an article on it. I found that it only takes a little variance to alter the balance of winning. I hope you enjoy the article. I put it up last night and I am at work right now. I reread it myself and found a few errors so don't burn me for it. I will edit it when I get home. But I hope the idea behind it can help some become better players.

http://www.texasholdempoker-stats.co..._variance.html

Re: Something to help others with variance
 

I like your article. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Peace

Re: Something to help others with variance
 

I wrote some free simulation software that can quantify a lot of what you are talking about. Here is the thread link:

Limit Simulator

I manually adjusted some of the win / loss breakdowns to make this a 2.00 BB player and simulated result over 10,000 hands and ran the sim 1000 times.

The Best Simulation hit 793.5 BB's
The Worst Simulation hit -392 BB's

Taking a more realistic number, the 90th percentile won 448 BB's and the 10th percentile lost 36 BB's which is a gap of 484 BB's or 4.84 BB/100 for a "REAL" 2BB/100 player...

From this I can also see that a real 2BB/100 player will lose money over a 10K stretch about 13% of the time and will be losing over 25K hands about 6% of the time!

rvg

Re: Something to help others with variance
 

Great post.

One criticism though. I'm not sure how this ultimately affects your analysis, but I believe your assumptions ignore hands that the hero wins without a showdown.

In other words, you assume that the hero will go to showdown with 561 hands out of 10,000. Then you state that you will "take 53.5% as our average for 2 big bets per 100 hands" and conclude that the hero will win 300 hands. This is wrong, because the only way a 2 big bet per 100 hands player will win 300 hands out of a thousand (and still be a 2bb/100 player) is if he never wins a hand without a showdown.

To put it one more way, your analysis needs to discount the # of hands won at showdown to compensate for the hands that the hero wins without a showdown.

Let me know if I'm missing something.

Re: Something to help others with variance
 

Cool software I will check it out.

Re: Something to help others with variance
 

I got what you mean and knew it would be an issue. But really the article was pointing out that just a 17 hand swing in 1 week of playing 10,000 hands at 3/6 40 hours was enough to slide the average down a bit. I didnt want to make super complicated calculations for the readers. I felt what I wrote got the point through.

Even I was shocked at how few hands are needed to have a super session or a losing session. On top of that add player reactions and tilt. I feel that furthers the swing either way.

I know that when I am running real good at a table I have less bad luck. Thats why I always start $100 above the minimum. Players entering the table after I post more than the minimum will think Im a tough opponent.

It was hard to grasp this concept for me for a long time. While I had swings both ways it seemed more like downward as I struggled to make $$$.

Usually the next day I review my session, usually around 500 hands, I saw how many mistakes I made just on the obvious end of the spectrum. If I added all those little mistakes over the last year my income would have been considerably higher. I am sure thats how it is for many players. So I follow my article. I don't tilt anymore.

Ironically the last 6 sessions I played my 1st hand was a bad beat in all 6 sessions. Found myself down $150 within the hour, then made it all up within 2 hours 5 of those 6 sessions. Talk about swings.

I usually play 2 hours at a time. Usually 2 hours a day except on the weekends.