Variance.

I all too often find myself chuckling when someone says "i've played 2000 hands, and i'm up(or down), what do you think?" and i'm always beaten to the punch by someone else who says "good sample size".

your winnings are dependent not only on your cards, but everyone elses. Which is easy to overlook because you may find that you get AA, or KK or AK 5 times in a short session and you subconsciously think that things even out quickly because you are seeing similar hands often.

here's how to calculate the number of possible hole card combinations for your own hand.

(52 x 51)/2 = 1326

I can already hear you saying that AsAc is basically the same as AhAd. yeh it is. but if you play micros, what about JohnnyFishfish who plays 74hh but not 74ss because he's sure hearts are lucky. This may not occur that often, but it will occur and it will effect your variance in poker.

lets extrapolate a bit by dealing in some more players.

(50 x 49)/2 = 1225
(48 x 47)/2 = 1128

1326 x 1225 x 1128 = 1,832,266,800.

my word. with 3 players in there's nearly 2 billion possible ways the hole cards can fall.

anyone care to guess how many with 6 players?

no? its 1,544,626,032,777,830,000... roughly.

so when someone says go play 20,000 hands and come back, they mean it, but they also mean that you're still only scratching the surface of what you may experience regarding variance in poker. We see things even out over short periods of time because the game includes many patterns of cards that occur in numerous different ways, and thats fine. But you need to expect that for things to truly even out you're going to have to play for years not a few days, I mean I might play 2500 hands in a solid session, so if i did that every single day, the minimum amount of time for me to possibly see all hole card combinations in a 3 way game is 2007 YEARS. and seriously, dont get me started on how postflop can effect this, aswell as the wide range of player specific tendencies.

get in it for the long haul.

This is helpful in explaining that every poker hand is practically unique, but less in explaining normal statistical variations in a player's winnings graph. An excellent tool to play with to figure these out is here:

ev++ Poker Tools :: Poker Variance Simulator

The relevant parameters are number of hands played, standard deviation and winrate, more than the number of possible combinations of starting hands.

For more insights about poker combinatorics and how to use them in play, see here:
http://www.flopturnriver.com/pokerfo...light=blockers

Originally Posted by daviddem

This is helpful in explaining that every poker hand is practically unique, but less in explaining normal statistical variations in a player's winnings.

I am aware of this, I mean to illustrate that we experience a never ending charade of unique situations. Obviously the variation is not as wide as it seems when looking at all possibilities, but i think for new players its easy to fall into expecting to have the same experience as any other person, not realizing that while there is a standard level of variance that you may be able to expect, variance in itself is not standard. and because there is beyond trillions of unique combinations you must play a lot of hands before you can come to any conclusions.

And when i was a first time player, i learnt and understood the mathematics of standard deviation. but i didn't really feel like it was that relevant to me until i'd played a lot. I also had an astromically long good run that made me think i was seriously shit hot when i really wasnt. I think that had someone shoved the enormity of possibility in poker in front of me i'd have been less inclined to make quick judgements that led to me spewing chips thinking i was just running bad, when actually i had big leaks.

variance exists and that all. you can search any tools, do any math, variance is variance and it always be in our life no matter what you do. but good players ( not me) will tell you this:

a bad player will always be losing w/ or w/o variance

a good players will always be winning w/ or w/o variance

this is the only conclusion you can have... you cant blaim variance, math, luck, badluck, fishes or anything else for your losing in the long run... it's your own fault... its true you can have a long bad run, but even then, review your hands and you will see that 50% of your losses are due to bad play.

so stop doing this shitty math to say : " oh, i am losing cause variance"...
fck that.. use the time to study and learn and review hands and see what you did wrong and it will help you more into becoming a winning player then doing this variance math .

pre flop AI AA will always lose ~20% of time to any PP and even gonna lose ~11% of time to 72o... and there's nothing you can do about it/// but you can do a lot to improve your game

P.S.: every "you" is general, not referrence to a certain person

variance is like when your cat gets hit by a car, but the new cat you get 3 weeks later is much cooler and prettier too.

variance is awesome because its why people bad at poker play poker