Avoid Mistakes - Variance is Overrated (My Almost 1K Post)

Introduction
This isn’t really anything new, just the same old stuff paraphrased to beat a dead horse, but this article is focused more on drilling the facts into you guys that bad variance is overrated and the mistakes that you make at the table will have a much greater impact on your win rate than getting those ace’s cracked or whatever cooler you run into during your grind.


Why You're Having A Shitty Month
I've noticed a number of people are having a somewhat shitty month poker wise. I hope this post sort of helps you keep things in perspective. It's probably been repeated 1000 times here on FTR, but it probably can't hurt to read this kind of stuff again. We have to remember that variance only affects us for a short amount of time. But poker truly comes down to making fewer mistakes than your opponents. If you're making a ton of mistakes - even if you're playing against a bunch of monkeys - you're going to lose, and it's that simple. I'm guilty of this and I've realized it, which is why I'm sharing.

Mistakes are the ultimate source of losing money in poker, aside from not knowing what the fuck you're doing (which is a mistake anyway)– NOT VARIANCE. Variance is sort of B.S as far as I’m concerned, though I won’t disagree that it isn’t there. I just think really shitty variance is very short term, and we only prolong this by making mistakes on top of it.


An Example of Why Mistakes Are So Costly
Think of it this way, you lose $100 getting AA all in preflop 4 times at $25nl. That’s 4 buy-ins, and that’s just shitty variance - you can't do anything about this, you must accept it.

Now you go off and you 2 barrel 3 times too many, for $4 each, c-bet 3 wet flops multiway against some stations when you have air for $2 each, then you stack off QQ preflop vs. a nits’ 4bet because “it’s QQ”, and then you make a hero call with ace high on the river with an aggro factor of 1.0 for $8. So you lost $100 to just plain old variance – HOWEVER, you just lost a total of $25+$8+$12+$6 = $51 by making poor decisions! That’s 2 buy-ins due to your inability to not make simple mistakes. Why are we making these mistakes again?

There's no fucking excuse to do all that shit ^. So what you lost 4 buy-ins with AA, well that's all you should have lost. But you couldn't just forget about it and you decided to go and mindlessly click the raise button - which is a huge mistake - because you feel the need to 'get even' or you feel that 'it's going to work this time'. I think we've all been guilty of this at one point or another. You just turned a -$100 session into a -$150 session. I use the amount of money instead of number of buy-ins because I want to show you that you're losing money making mistakes.


Poker Is An Illusion - Fewer Mistakes Clear It Up
I've found that the weird thing about poker is you can play really good, still lose, or play really bad, and end up winning. Basically, how good you are is just an illusion - we don't really know how good we are, because the cards are the final determination of results. Sometimes we feel we make good plays, and then never look back at them and forget about it. Turns out these plays could be costing us money. It's hard to look back at every single play we make - some plays that we feel are automatic +EV, are truly -EV, but we've been taught to think differently. This has been said over and over again, but I don't think the point can be stressed enough. We have to be aware that making mistakes in poker is unacceptable. If we make fewer mistakes, we begin to see positive results faster. We also begin to figure out when we're playing good, and when we're really just experiencing 'bad variance' when we lose. As you make fewer and fewer mistakes, you'll realize when you do make a mistake, and you'll be able to correct it. (Mistakes obviously can arise from tilt, where we make a mistake that we know is a mistake, yet do it anyway. I don't really know much about psychology so I don't have much to say on this).


You Need To Play Your Best - Regardless of Your Stake
When playing bad, and knowing that you're playing bad, it's tough to get back to playing good again. I think as humans we normally associate winning money in poker with playing good, but this isn't always the case. However, if we're on a cold streak and can't seem to make anything happen, doubt creeps into the mind and starts to take over.

It's hard to remember what it feels like to play good again - so you can't play good. I think the reason is because again, we associate playing good with running good. Our brains have been tricked into thinking about it all wrong, and all we can do is accept it, be aware of it, and attempt to trick ourselves into realizing that running bad and playing good can both occur simultaneously, but so can running good and playing bad. The only problem with this is, usually when running bad; we also play bad too as a side effect - which hurts the bottom line. Some people play worse than others during this period; therefore, some people will lose more when running bad than others.



As Mike Caro points out in his book Caro's Secrets of Winning Poker:

"The main reason people fail to accomplish as much as they could - in poker and in life - is they don't play their best game always."



You have to play your best. There's absolutely no fucking room for error in this game. After experiencing 4 different levels of microstakes, the concept still prevails. At $2nl you can make a shit load of mistakes and still own - at $25nl you just can't afford to make those same mistakes. Thus, the higher of level you play, the less you can afford to make mistakes and still profit. If you're making the same amount of mistakes at say $100nl as you are $2nl, you're going to get crushed, no matter how good of a $2nl win rate you have. YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MAKE MISTAKES NO MATTER HOW GOOD OR BAD YOU ARE RUNNING, EVERYTHING EVENS OUT IN THE LONG RUN AND MISTAKES JUST COST YOU MONEY.


m2m's Law of Shitty Win Rates
Running bad is truly only quite short term, but this period becomes prolonged the more we allow it to affect us. Thus, the more variance affects you, the more mistakes you will make, and the longer a 'downswing' you will experience, therefore giving you a shitty win rate which you blame on variance and ignore the fact that you've made countless mistakes.

So like 10k or 20k hands later, it still feels like we're running bad, even though our play has deteriorated and we've not playing good all along. If we're not playing good, even if we run good, we won't make as much money, and therefore, won't see those desired results. We've now been tricked into thinking that we're just running bad and things will turn around. Well the truth is, THINGS AREN'T GOING TO TURN AROUND UNTIL YOU STOP MAKING MISTAKES.

Making mistakes is just a bad habit. Even if they don't cost as much now, they will eventually. Might as well learn not to fuck up while you're splashing pennies around.

And this comes down to the Fundamental Theorem of Poker, which has been repeated a god awful amount of times, but for fucks sake if you just read this and forget about it, it will come back to haunt you. You need to UNDERSTAND it in order to not make mistakes. I’m not even going to write it out, it’s been quoted in a multitude of posts/videos/forums etc all over the net, not to mention it’s in the book. If you don’t have the Theory of Poker or you’re too lazy to Google the theorem and you don’t already know it – you’re hopeless and will likely spew your roll away before $50nl - which you will ultimately deserve.


Cliff notes:
-Variance is overrated
-You can't afford to make mistakes
-Least mistakes = greater profit
-m2m's theorem isn't really new but I took credit for it anyway
-Lazy and unwilling to use Google to figure out what the fundamental theorem of poker is= Life fail and you should diagf
-if you skipped to the bottom to read these notes and you're grinding microstakes all I can do is put my palm to my face


Additional (Edits):
Here is something I feel is very necessary to add that we need to be aware of:

Originally Posted by XTR1000

Id add that positive variance is incredibly underrated. No one ever mentions varaince after having an above average month, cuz we´re all killing the games, but once an overset rivers everyone cries about running like shiat.

Fucking epic sir. 5 spades and all that jazz.

I should seriously post my graph for this month. Towards the end (its quite obvious lol) I have a $200 "downswing." It got started by variance KK < 96o AIPF, etc. I compounded it by spewing. Calling SS's AI 3bet with AJs and whatnot. (This shit adds up quick.)

Immediately after though, once I moved back down to 10nl, I got my shit straight. Locked down and played solid poker. Stopped spewing, and all that jazz. I have run a lil good KK < AA like twice, but also got AA < JJ and KK < 99, so that evens out. The difference is keep playing solid poker. I have virtually recovered all losses in about 5 days.

So to reiterate, m2m is spot on in this post. Its fairly obvious, but I'll be damned if it didn't need to be said.

NH SIR

All in all, excellent advice.

I would note that "variance is overrated" is different than "variance doesn't exist".

Yesterday, I won $500 at the 15/30 table on a night when I had been up as much as $900 and down as much as $1,000.

Now, did I make mistakes? Yep! I made a couple of loose calls where players were showing strength and I misread them as possible bluffers. I also just made a bonehead error of failing to recognize that a 4 card straight was on the board when I had top pair. The mistakes probably cost me $120-$180. But the rest of the $400 between +$900 and +$500 was variance. I just got involved in some hands where I had the pot odds to chase draws and the draws never materialized.

The key is to review the hands where you won or lost a lot of money at the end of a session. Ask yourself if you played properly on each street. Sometimes it turns out to be variance. Sometimes it turns out to be poor play. Sometimes poor play makes a variance issue more costly (for example, it's variance that you were card dead for 2 hours, but it was poor play when you pressed with middle pair against aggression in the only hand where you got a piece of the flop during that time). This is the process that allows the player to separate pure variance issues from mistakes.

Originally Posted by LawDude

All in all, excellent advice.

I would note that "variance is overrated" is different than "variance doesn't exist".

Yesterday, I won $500 at the 15/30 table on a night when I had been up as much as $900 and down as much as $1,000.

Now, did I make mistakes? Yep! I made a couple of loose calls where players were showing strength and I misread them as possible bluffers. I also just made a bonehead error of failing to recognize that a 4 card straight was on the board when I had top pair. The mistakes probably cost me $120-$180. But the rest of the $400 between +$900 and +$500 was variance. I just got involved in some hands where I had the pot odds to chase draws and the draws never materialized.

The key is to review the hands where you won or lost a lot of money at the end of a session. Ask yourself if you played properly on each street. Sometimes it turns out to be variance. Sometimes it turns out to be poor play. Sometimes poor play makes a variance issue more costly (for example, it's variance that you were card dead for 2 hours, but it was poor play when you pressed with middle pair against aggression in the only hand where you got a piece of the flop during that time). This is the process that allows the player to separate pure variance issues from mistakes.

Very true, and a nice follow up post. My intention wasn't to lead us to think variance doesn't exist, though I think it's good to forget about it when playing, and also realize that variance isn't always the root cause of losing. Of course after the fact we should be concerned with the pots we won or lost and determine whether we made correct plays, and as you said the process of reviewing our hands alows us to distinguish between what was truly a mistake and what was truly beyond our control.

Perhaps we could say ignore variance while at the table but think about it more away from the table after session review?

nh LawDude

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

Mistakes are the ultimate source of losing money in poker,

nice post
not recognising mistakes is a problem too

Overall good thoughts. I think you're too hard on making mistakes, people are only human and noones going to play perfect all the time, but we should work to reduce them. You also make the mistake (or just leave it out) of assuming a mistake is making a -EV play instead of a +EV play, where often a mistake is making a less +EV play than could have been made (a lot of microstakes players will see a big difference once they work this out).


Main point of variance leading to bad play, and that bad play being lumped into "variance" is spot on though. A lot of downswings (my own included for sure) get blamed on variance when theres just plain a lot of bad poker in there as well.

Good post.

Id add that positive variance is incredibly underrated. No one ever mentions varaince after having an above average month, cuz we´re all killing the games, but once an overset rivers everyone cries about running like shiat.

Nice post overall, and I am as guilty as the next guy of compounding my losses by letting variance get to me and playing bad as a result.

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

... bad variance is overrated and the mistakes that you make at the table will have a much greater impact on your win rate than getting those ace’s cracked or whatever cooler you run into during your grind.

So true.

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

It's hard to remember what it feels like to play good again - so you can't play good. I think the reason is because again, we associate playing good with running good. Our brains have been tricked into thinking about it all wrong, and all we can do is accept it, be aware of it, and attempt to trick ourselves into realizing that running bad and playing good can both occur simultaneously, but so can running good and playing bad.

I'm not a psychologist either, but I think this is absolutely key to it. Although we all try not to be results-oriented, at the end of the day we measure our success by our winrate and the amount of money we make. Thats why gambling is so addictive - our brains become hardwired to crave that "winning feeling". The more objective and dispassionate you can train yourself to be, the better your chances of playing your "A" game all the time. Maybe we should all just pretend its Monopoly money??

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

I've found that the weird thing about poker is you can play really good, still lose, or play really bad, and end up winning. Basically, how good you are is just an illusion - we don't really know how good we are, because the cards are the final determination of results.

This is complete bollocks, and doesn't make any sense at all in the context of the rest of your post. The first sentence is right, but the whole point is that its right because of variance. When you discount variance, how good you are and how well you play compared to your opponents should be the ONLY determinant of your winrate. Its not an illusion at all. Otherwise we might as well play roulette.

Lawdude touched on a vital, vital point - session reviews!

These are absolutely #1 for me when it comes to plugging leaks, you should make time for them every.single.time. you play poker. It's amazing what you pick up in hindsight, even with hands that you barely remember playing.

nh, I only skimmed - I'll read in full later today - too few players read Mike Caro's stuff

Variance still not overrated imo.

People who took the under of the 50line on the number of times "Mistakes" was used in this post are really shittin their pants though.

Originally Posted by MDHughes604

Variance still not overrated imo.

Yes, variance is overrated (see LawDude's point below), and certainly overrated by most (all?) microstakes players judging by posts in the BC over the last 2 years.

Originally Posted by LawDude

I would note that "variance is overrated" is different than "variance doesn't exist".

Nuff said.

_______

I will add this to BJaust's point: fear of making mistakes is -EV, and often leads to taking the +EV action instead of the +++EV one.

_______

Originally Posted by Lucothefish

Lawdude touched on a vital, vital point - session reviews!

Session reviews are more helpful when you spend time working out ranges. Really working at it.

I stopped having "variance" when I learned to play. Now the only variance I have is how much I end up earning.

Mike Caro is my hero. Poker1.com is a great site.

Wonderful post M2M. Keep on check/raising the fakk out of villains!

The most common mistake I make is when I am up for a session, and instead of check/raising people to tiltheaven try to protect my winnings by check/folding...

Being afraid of making mistakes is different from a strong desire to play perfect poker. M2M definitely strives for perfection and it will be interesting for us all to see how far he can reach.

Here is some Norwegian culture for you all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKjEY...165&playnext=1

This is my favourite standup-up show: "What kind of jazz is that..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qg6AkhIYVs

I'd just like to make a quick comment to support M2M here. I had been playing a lot of poker, and most of it poorly. I took two weeks off, without playing a hand. Came back and played very well... Attitude and perspective make you realize a lot of your losses were not necessarily variance, but bad play spurred on by variance... spew by proxy if you will. Step back, deep breath, relax, play your game, the monies will work out in the end. Good things happen to good players.

Originally Posted by XTR1000

Good post.

Id add that positive variance is incredibly underrated. No one ever mentions varaince after having an above average month, cuz we´re all killing the games, but once an overset rivers everyone cries about running like shiat.

I think I'm going to quote you on this and add it into the article because this is so true.

Too many times people think that

Extended Positive Variance= Damn I'm good at poker

I went on a major heater in December at 5NL and I was horrible (still am but to a different degree)

lol when i first started going on a heater meant to me that I can play for a living lul. Now I man up to the fact that I'm running like god, seems to help me stay focused.