Variance In Live Poker

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Many people think poker is a game of pure chance, but in fact it is a game of skill. Making the correct decisions in every situation will lead to long-term success. If you play better poker than your opponents, you will win over time. The luck factor only plays a part in the short term.

Variance In Live Poker Tournaments
Variance In Live Poker Deuces Wild
Variance In Live Poker Games

The problem is that even if you are playing correctly and making all the right moves, you can still lose if you hit a run of bad luck. The key is to learn how to handle downswings like this, and to make sure that your game is not adversely affected by factors outside of your control.

Video Poker Game Variance: What is variance? While we could go into the mathematical details we will explain variance on video poker machines using real world examples. Variance is one of the characteristics that makes a big difference in the short term results between one game and another. Lets compare two popular machines. Like the angler’s ‘one that got away’, variance has become a bit of a poker in-joke – the excuse when things go pear-shaped. But it has a sound mathematical basis, the idea being that in the real world, results are only predictable in a general way. One-off events tend to vary. It’s as simple as that. The first thing the Variance Calculator does, is to run 20 samples over the amount of hands, winrate and standard deviation specified. It’ll also calculate the expected winnings over the amount of hands. This number will appear as a rather boring straight and black line in the graph. Basically in poker variance is a term (or more specifically a number) which describes how far your results spread around the mean. To put it simpler – a lot of variance means many swings; less variance means fewer swings. But let’s look at an example to get a better grasp at the concept of variance in poker and put some numbers on it. Poker Variance & Downswings 'I'm running bad,' is a phrase you will often hear poker players use to describe periods of bad luck or variance. In poker, it sometimes just feels as if the cards are.

The short-term effect of luck in poker – both good and bad – is known as “variance”. Good players accept variance as part of poker, and work on reducing its influence on their own game.

The Bad Beat

A “bad beat” is the name given to an occurence in poker where a markedly worse hand beats a better one, through fortune alone. The person suffering the “bad beat” plays the hand correctly, gets their money into the pot when they were a long way ahead, but is still beaten by the turn of a card beyond the player’s control.

However many inexperienced players may claim to have been dealt a “bad beat”, when in fact they have simply been beaten by a hand that was only marginally weaker than theirs. A genuine bad beat occurs when you have a hand that is a clear favorite, and gives your opponent very little chance of catching up.

Do you get frustrated playing poker tournaments? You play all the time and it seems like you never cash. And even when you do, you cash the minimum. Every once in a while you get teased with a deep run only to run Kings into Aces – resulting in another broken mouse.

Well as you gain experience, you learn that in order to be successful as a poker player you need to get comfortable with running bad. This is even more prevalent if you are a poker tournament specialist. But no matter how experienced you are, these bad runs can test you and make you question your skill level. This is especially true if you are an amateur poker player who only plays a handful of tournaments a week. You can actually go months without cashing and this duration of time in between cashes can skew your view of reality and affect your play.

Now if you read enough poker forums and websites you will hear about all the online tournament pros who are regularly taking down five and six-figure cashes. They paint this picture of guys constantly making final tables and raking in mounds of cash. You may even be a bit jealous and wonder, “what do those guys have that I don’t?” Well, I’m hoping this article will help answer that question and provide some much needed perspective on the topics of volume and variance.

Amateur Poker Players vs. Pros

Amateurs – For the purpose of this article, an amateur player is someone who plays about 1-3 times per week, usually at night. They have a “real job” and may have a family or are in college full time, so they can only put in part-time hours. But make no mistake, this player is serious about the game and spends time on poker forums, watching training videos, etc. Since we’re talking about tournament poker, the amateur in this article plays mostly large field no-limit hold’em tournaments. They may be a winning player, break even or maybe a slight loser in the game thus far in their career.

Pros – A professional is someone who plays online poker for their sole source of income. For this article, we are using those who specialize in large field online poker tournaments.

The Stats

Before reading too deep into these numbers, keep in mind that the purpose of this article is to provide perspective into your own results by comparing them to the results of other players. It is not meant to be a scientific study.

The numbers below represent an average of 10 players from each category and use results from both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars from 2010. The pro stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 8/22/10 and the amateur stats were taken from 1/1/10 until 9/20/10. They only include tournaments with over 180 players.

Pros*	Amateurs*
# Played	3557	661.5
Avg Played/Day**	21.5	3.58
In the Money	13.10%	15.7%
Final Tables	3.13%	2%
Top 3	1.36%	0.54%
Top 3 when at Final Table	43.61%	28.09%
Wins	0.73%	0.22%
ROI	77.65%	19.68%
Longest Non-Cash Streak	47	22.5

* Pro stats were taken from a ranking of the top 10 online tournament players. Amateur stats were taken from a sample of 10 amateur players who volunteered their screen name for use in this study.

**Avg. Played/Day is based on a 5 day week, but also only includes playing 2 sites. Actual volume per day may be larger for those who play more than 2 sites and less than 5 days a week.

What Do These Stats Mean?

As you can see, the pros are not these mythical beasts who cash all the time and final table every tournament. Media attention can sometimes give off a false reality as it only highlights their wins and never mentions how many losses it took to get there.

The realities are:

Even the top pros only win tournaments less than 1% of the time. For some it was as low as 0.60%. So this means they are winning only 1 out of every 100 times. Of course variance doesn’t always come on schedule and they can go 200-300 tournaments without a win.
Top pros only final table around 3% of the time. Some are as low as 2%.
Top pros are only cashing about 13% of the time. This means they lose money 87% of the time they play! In fact, amateurs cash more often than pros. The difference is that when pros do cash, they cash deep more often.
Pros have massive downswings like everyone else. In fact, becasue of the volume they play, they have had longer non-cash streaks.

Why have the pros averaged a $400,000 profit this year before September? It is in their ability to close tournaments. There is a reason why their ROI is 58% higher. Let’s look at the stats:

Pros make 1/3 more final tables than amateur poker players.
At a 9 person final table, the average of hitting top 3 should be 33%. Pros are hitting this 43.61% of the time.
Of the times they cash, pros are final tabling almost twice as often as amateurs (23.9% compared to 12.8%).
Pros finish in the top 3 almost 3x as often as amateurs.
Volume, volume, volume. Let’s not forget that pros play all day, every day. This is their job. They have a distinct advantage of overcoming bad variance much quicker and also seeing “the long run” of making profitable decisions quicker.

Keep in mind that the group of amateurs used were volunteers from various poker forums. While not all were winning players, the fact that they study the game says they likely have better results than an average amateur. Also, because of their volume size an individual amateur’s skills may be better or worse than their results show.

Improving Your Game

How can you use these stats to improve your game?

Add More Tables

Get outside of your 1-3 tabling comfort zone and simply add a couple more tables. I know the argument is that it’s harder to make reads, but the volume you put in will make up for that. In addition, this extra volume means you are playing more hands and will result in improving your game even faster. This extra experience will more than make up for the short-term loss of a perfect read.

Play More Days

Just try to add 1 more day per week. Don’t be lazy. If you currently play 7 tournaments a day, adding 1 more day x 52 weeks = 364 more tournaments/year. Even at the amateur ROI average above of 20% and average buy-in of $30, that means an extra $2,184 in profit.

Stop Caring About Individual Tournaments

It’s easy to expend emotional energy in any single poker tournament. You’re trying to win of course. But the odds are that you’re not going to. In fact, you’re only going to cash about 15% of the time. All you can do is focus on making good decisions and the variance will work itself out in the end.

Play for the Win

There’s a reason why amateurs cash more than pros. They care more about it and tighten up near the bubble. But you will miss out on valuable opportunities to accumulate chips if you are playing just to cash. In addition, you can’t fear busting or making a mistake when you get deep. In order to make real money playing poker tournaments, you have to trust your instincts and play to win.

If you’ve ever grown frustrated playing poker tournaments, don’t sweat it. Keep in perspective that even the best players in the world don’t win that often. The only way to balance out negative variance is to put in enough volume where your skill can prevail.