Quote Originally Posted by iopq
Variance has a strict definition. Variance is calculated by taking the difference between the mean and each individual result and squaring it. Variance is actually not a very useful number, but the square root of variance is the standard deviation, which IS useful.

By the standard limit theorem your variance and standard deviation will decrease when you're quad tabling. You should lose less quad tabling because usually when you lose a buy-in on one table you gain money on others. It's just as likely to lose four buy-ins at the same time quad tabling as to lose four buy-ins SEQUENTIALLY on one table.

thanks for the stats lesson but i think you're missing my point. in a given day if you play 100 hands, your variance will be smaller than if you played 400 hands, even though your variance per 100 hands isn't changing. Think about it this way. Let's say you are one tabling, and have bad luck and drop one buy in per day for four straight days. Now, pretend you were multitabling 4 tables and played the exact same hands, and you dropped four buy-ins in one day. your variance per day is increasing dramatically, which is what we care about when talking about variance, thus why i said it depends on what you mean when you say variance.

hah, i did a google search looking for a better explanation, and i found a forum that was talking about it, and there was an FTR thread linked into. good show.

http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...g-lhe-7434.htm