Ok, I have a serious pet peeve...

[Voltron87]

if i wasn't doing so well i would have flipped out there. sucess does help you deal with bad beats, im not even bothered by that too much. if i was even for the last 40 sngs i would have hunted him down and pulled yugo. ive never seen the spite call on level one like that.

[dfscott]

You need to broaden your thinking a bit:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
var·i·ance (vâr-ns, vr-)
n.

1. a. The act of varying.
b. The state or quality of being variant or variable; a variation.
c. A difference between what is expected and what actually occurs.
2. The state or fact of differing or of being in conflict.
3. Law.
a. A discrepancy between two statements or documents in a proceeding.
b. License to engage in an act contrary to a usual rule: a zoning variance.
4. Statistics. The square of the standard deviation.
5. Chemistry. The number of thermodynamic variables, such as temperature and pressure, required to specify a state of equilibrium of a system, given by the phase rule </pre><hr />

I think you are thinking about #4 (or a more precise derivative). I think a lot of people, while thinking that they are talking about #4, are really talking about 1-c. If you allow for that possibility, you can consider them imprecise instead of just wrong. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[mosdef]

Fair enough. But, as I've pointed out in some follow-up posts, I was actually joking about being really upset about this.

That said, it is my heartfelt belief that the infestation of posts with the word "variance" comes from the statistical analysis that has been done over the last year or so on the forum talking about how many SNGs you need to get a feel for your actual ROI and confidence intervals for results and all that fun stuff. My point (I think I had one at one point) is that losing streaks are often bad luck. But variance is not equivalent to bad luck. It's not even equivalent to bad performance. You can increase your ROI while jacking up your variance by changing your style.

[citanul]

is it bad that since this jesus guy has started posting, i now hate all christians?

citanul

[SuitedSixes]

*WHEW* For a minute there I was afraid this was going to be about something trivial and silly.