[UMTerp]

I'm not convinced of that. His maximum theoretical downswing (within a certain confidence interval) would certainly be bigger than Lori's (percentage-wise), but that's only because she would have a higher winrate from playing the lower buy-in SNGs.

Because of the "step" (for lack of a better word) nature of SNGs (the fact that there are only 10 distinct results), it's hard to create a lot of extra variance and still be a winning player. The only way I can think to do it would be to start pushing a lot more marginal hands (and calling marginal ones) on the bubble. Even that wouldn't do a whole lot of damage I wouldn't think though.

That's why Aleo used to say that it was a pretty safe bet for just about all SNG players to enter a "1.4" (I forget the exact number, but I think that was it) in the spot for standard deviation in his spreadsheet when playing around with confidence intervals.

Now I'm not saying that there's NO way to increase variance - of course there is - but the mathematical nature of SNGs tends to give a more concrete right/wrong answer moreso than other forms of poker, hence making variance pretty standard for most players that carry a simliar winrate.