Ok, I have a serious pet peeve...

[mosdef]

And I know many of you won't care or understand, but...

Can we please, please, please stop abusing and disusing the word "variance" on this forum. I wince in pain, honest-to-goodness pain, when I read the following posts which come up time and time again.

"I'm down x buy-ins over the past month, but that's just variance and ...",

or

"I know it might just be variance, but I've got a lot of 5th place finishes and ..."

Everybody please stay with me here. Variance is a very specific probability concept. It is a measure of the degree of spread in the probability distribution that defines a random variable. It is NOT a catch-all word to justify your losing streaks. If you finish 5th time and again, that's not an indicator that the variance demon is out to get you. If you have lost 20 buyins over a few weeks, that's not a sign of "bad variance". Variance is neither good nor bad. If you finish last everytime your variance of results is 0, but that's not good. If you finished first half the time and last half the time, your variance would be pretty damn high, but that's not bad - your ROI would be sweet.

So in conclusion, everyone here who hasn't read a graduate text in probability theory from cover to cover should never, ever post again. Well, maybe that's a little extreme. But honestly guys, please help me out here.