Can someone explain variance?

I've been here for a little while now, and the term comes up every so often. Can someone explain it?

Well if a thousand monkies are sitting at a thousand typewriters they will eventually write 'Romeo and Julliet'. Also even if you are playing perfect poker, which few can do anyways, all you can do is play the odds when they are in your favour. This means that even if you only went in against 72o all night with AA they would still win 33% of the time (or something). Whilst you would therefore make a whole stack odds being what they are there would be a spell where 72 would beat you 10 times in a row and you would be experiencing 'VARIANCE'. Its horrific when you hit your first reall downswing and look at the hands and can see nothing wrong, but so long as you dont slide into 'TILT' and move down a level if necessary you will eventually pull out of it.

i new myself but as far as i can say its an ammount of money that youll loose over the course of a downswing...
THe key is to have a bankroll that can handle this "variance" without putting you in a stressed situation where you cant play your a-game.

Thats why a pretty big bankroll is needed even for the lowest of limits (at least for beginners)

Please correct me if im wrong

variance is also the reason why fish keep playing. a fish can start with 100 bucks, and make it up to 500 bucks, making horrible plays, but he just had a bit of good variance where he was winning pots when the odds were against him because he "saw the card coming" or whatever.

Variance is the 12% that 72 off (its about 12% and not 33% thank god lol) that will beat your Aces or Kings etc.

But varience can be positive as well. So if you had a 4 week period where your aces never got beat by that 72o then that would be attributed to varience too.

here is a mathematical analogy.

Say you are betting on the flip of a coin. You know that on any coinflip the odds of a head or tell is 0.5.

Say you flip a coin 10 times...how many times will there be heads ? say approximately 5 times.

How about if you flip a coin 100000 times...? you should get
50000 heads right. thats true.

but no where does it say that you wont get 2000 consecutive heads or tells. thats variance for you.

is my analogy correct ??

Yea any streak where you get loads of heads (or tails) in a row is varience. Its a short term, non-permenant deviation from the average.

Awesome. I've always understood the concept and always reassure myself of it. I guess I never knew what it was called. I think I remember someone saying that NLHE has a whole lot more variance than a lot of other games? Is this a common thought among NLHE players?

I think limit has more variance acually, since you can't shut out draws etc. It's about a lot of small decisions that adds up over time.

mathematically,
variance = standard deviation squared.

limit has more variance in relation to your winrate, not in terms of BB/100.

When the fish suck out on your hand.

luck

Originally Posted by Demiparadigm

mathematically,
variance = standard deviation squared.

limit has more variance in relation to your winrate, not in terms of BB/100.

oh oh oh, im in stats i know what that is oh oh oh me me pick me