[Closed] Something about variance.

Puschkin81 · 2008-02-11T00:48:09Z

Variance and Downswings by Unam1337 We hear it a lot of times: „You can't imagine!“, „That's not possible!“, „This is so unbelievable, it's rigged!“. Be honest, we all are inclined to say things like that when our BR kept getting smaller and we must go down a limit level even though our opponents are unbelievable bad. This week, I'd like to pick up this rather psychological topic and going to show you some charts. The charts are not mine but they will give you an understanding of this topic and will help you to overcome your downsings more easily. The following chart shows how big the deviation of our True ROI (Return of Investment) might be after 1000 Sit and Gos. As you can see, the smaller our ROI, the larger our possible deviation after 1000 tournaments. It can be illustrated in a simplified way if we see how this deviation influences our BRM. The chart shows us the probabilities of getting a downswing for a player with a given ROI when playing a certain number of tournaments. A concrete example: A player with a ROI of 5% has the probability of 5% for a 100BI Downswing when playing 2000 SNGs. You really should take a closer look to this chart in order to know where you get into when playing SNGs. Another chart shows what this can mean for your bankroll, or in other words, how the probability is that we go broke when playing a certain amount of buy ins. Again a short explanation: A player with a ROI of 15% after 2000 SNGs has a probability of 6% of going broke with a BRM of 20BI. But a player who keeps an ROI of 5% after 2000 SNGs has a probability of 40% of going broke with a BRM of 20 BI. What I wanted to show you is that variance is always a crucial factor in poker. This factor may assume alarming dimensions by the many hands which are played to showdown in SNGs. Even solid winning players are not spared of this variance. The only prevention of swings like this is a solid BRM. It's left to one's own devices how this BRM is supposed to look like. It depends on factors like the own ROI, the favourite limit level, the ability to go down a level if necessary and particularly on the psychological strain. I hope you can draw hope from this article because everyone has his swings. It's very important to realize this fact in order to be well prepared by having a adequate BR and a good psyche. The credits for the charts and analyses and also my thanks goes to the originator of this excel file.