What to Do When Variance Rears Its Ugly Head

If you play in a casino or poker room for any amount of time, you’ll likely be quickly introduced to variance. As the name suggest, variance is simply the phenomenon that for any event with an observable outcome, the results will vary.

Let’s say you flip a coin ten times. While unlikely, it’s entirely possible that all ten times it will be heads. The odds are 50/50 so you’d expect five heads and five tails, but the sample size (the number of times the coin is flipped) is only ten, which is very low and prone to wild swings, such as results of ten heads or ten tails. Those swings are variance.

If you flip that same coin 1,000,000 times, the results will be much more similar to what the math suggests, with a final tally of something close to 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails. The larger the sample size, the more likely the results will be closer to what the mathematical odds say they should be.

Understanding and accepting that variance exists is pretty crucial for anyone who expects to spend a lot of time playing poker. Starting with the best hand in poker doesn’t mean you’ll end up with the winning hand. You’ll have frustrating nights that will drive you absolutely bonkers, where you have great hands but they keep getting beaten, over and over, by players with much worse hands.

It doesn’t mean that online poker is rigged. It simply means that one night of results isn’t enough to base any conclusion on. It’s too small a sample, too prone to variance. Because the variance is high due to a small sample size, you’re guaranteed to encounter some crazy, frustrating sessions that defy the odds.

All you can do is stick to your guns, and do what should be doing anyway. Read poker strategy books and review your play. Make sure you’re playing hands correctly and not letting the variance cause you to play badly or go on tilt.

If you’re a good player, and playing correctly, over time your results will reverse course. Poker is, at heart, a game of math, and your results will indicate that as your sample size increases. Your big hands will win more often than not. Your correct play will ultimately be rewarded as long as you stick to your guns.

Position, Position, Position

Good poker players are always aware of their position at the table. In some cases, your position at the table is more important than the actual cards you have.

If you’re first to act in a hand, with everyone else waiting, you need to have a really good hand before you should consider betting or raising. There might be a raise after you, then another raise, and suddenly you have to call two more bets, just to continue in the hand.

If you’re last to act in a hand, you get to see all the action before you. You know exactly how much it will cost you to see another card and you don’t need to worry about someone raising behind you.

The biggest effect that your position should have is on how many hands you play. If you’re in early position and have to act first, you only want to play the strongest of hands, such as AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 1010, and AK. Because you might get raised, you only want to play hands that you don’t mind potentially calling raises with.

If you’re in late position, you can play more hands, especially if no one has raised yet. You still want to only play good starting hands, but you can be a little looser in your standards, since you’ll be able to see the action before making any decisions throughout the hand.

Don’t just focus on your own cards and ignore everything else at the table, as sometimes your position can be just as important, especially when initially deciding whether or not to play a hand.

Good Bankroll Management

One of the most difficult parts of playing good poker has nothing to do with the cards you’re dealt. No matter how good you are at playing poker, if you’re not good at managing your money you’ll eventually run into trouble at the tables. Great poker players “go bust” each and every day, losing their entire bankrolls, and more often than not it’s because of their poor money management skills, not because of their card-playing skills.

Poker players call the money they have available to play with their “bankroll”, and how they manage their bankroll has a lot to do with whether they’re winning or losing players. While you might think it’s as simple as “Don’t lose all your money”, good bankroll management is actually a bit more complicated than that.

The most important consideration is to be sure that you’re playing the correct stakes for your bankroll. If you only have $100, you shouldn’t be playing at a table with blinds of $10/$20. You have no room for error and playing just one or two losing hands can wipe you out. It’s very tempting to want to play in bigger games, as you can win more money there, but it’s a dangerous proposition if you don’t have the proper bankroll for those stakes.

Poker is a game of streaks, good and bad, and you need to be sure that you have enough money to ride out the bad streaks. If playing at a certain stakes means bringing all of your bankroll to the table, where you could lose it in just an hour or two, you’re playing stakes too high for your bankroll.

A good rule of thumb is to be sure you have at least 200 big bets in your bankroll for whatever stakes you decide to play. If you’re playing $1/2 Limit Hold’em, you should have at least $400 total in your bankroll. This gives you enough of a cushion to go through the normal swings of the game without going broke and losing all of your money.

Winning at poker in the long run is a marathon, not a sprint. All the great players have started at the bottom, just like you, and slowly worked their way up through the limits, moving up step by step when they’ve won enough to give them the bankroll to move up to the next limit.