Poker: Has Variance been your Friend or Foe?

The variance in poker can be an ally or an adversary, depending on how you look at it. It's variance that attracts recreational players, making the game exciting and unpredictable. After all, what would poker be without the possibility of anyone emerging victorious at any time? Has Variance been your Friend or Foe? Let's find out...

The Variance Unknown: A Unique Challenge in Poker

Compared to high-performance mind games, like chess, the skill required is difficult to measure. In chess, the winner is always the most skilled, but in poker, variance makes the winner more unpredictable. This unpredictability is what makes poker unique and challenging.

However, it's important to note that the same variance that can lead a player to victory can also cause difficult moments. Your career can be frustrated when you can't deal with the emotional swings caused by variance. It's easy to let your frustrations get the better of you, but the key is to understand that variance is an inherent part of the game.

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The Variance Rollercoaster

Learn to focus on making the right decisions, selecting the best tournaments and continually improving your technical and mental skills. Don't use variance as an excuse to justify failures or as a crutch for your frustration. Instead, see it as a challenge that brings balance to the game.

In poker, you can do everything right and still lose occasionally. But it's precisely this unpredictability that makes every victory a special achievement. After all, the real learning is in the journey, the experiences and the personal development along the way.

Practical example

The variance in poker refers to the short-term deviations in the winrate of a player in relation to the expected results. Even if a player wins with a winrate of 8BB/100, it is rare that your winrate is always exactly 8BB/100 over a sample of hands. In other words, this deviation is called the variance. 

The larger the sample of hands analyzed, the closer the winrate will be expected value (Ev). However, as variance is huge in poker, large deviations are common, especially in smaller hand samples, such as less than 50,000 hands.

You can use variance calculators to simulate the calculation of this standard deviation. For example, using Poker Variance Calculator.

Example variance calculation for 100,000 hands and 8BB/100 winrate

Facing the Challenge: How Have You Dealt with Variance?

So how have you dealt with variance? Face it head on, taking its ups and downs as opportunities to grow and excel in the fascinating world of poker.

If you liked this article on variance in poker, check out more interesting content on strategies and tips on the Polarize Poker website. Learn and improve your skills to become an even better player!

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