Please know, this is not a brag thread. When playing in low stakes games with lots of weak players, players who limp-call 80% of all their starting hands, players who will cold call a 3bet preflop with Q3s and chase until the river for that third nut flush, I’ve noticed, even low VPIPing, there is significant variance. Is this a necessary aspect of these games or are there exploitative adjustment a player can make to reduce the variance? Obviously bluffing is out, but anything else?

No, most of the variance you cant reduce. At lest not how i define variance. Its a part of poker, and the faster ones accept it- to the better. Playing with weak opponents means that our possible EV or winrate can be high, but so can the variance be on the other side of the coin. If you sit in a very good loose action packed game with 2 whales spewing off buyins to the table, it means that you both can win alot but also lose alot in any given short span of time. The EV is huge on such tables, but so is the variance as a natural consequence.

Like, you cant avoid running KK into AA 5 times in a row. You cant avoid stacking off on the flop with a set or two pair, only to see the guy with a flushdraw bink his draw 10 times in a row against you. You cant avoid sitting there totally carddead for 8 hours straight, when that happens. You cant avoid people binking 2 our 3 outers on you time and time again when you get it in as a big fav. You just cant.

So yes: the variance is necessary. The fact that any fish or losing player can suck out and win on any given day makes them coming back for more. If they were losing 100 out of a 100 sessions, they would simply go broke and never come back.

Are there any different lines, though? Like checking certain textures kore than going for thin value, etc? Or do you play each situation the same as you would against a non basement-dweller?

You can reduce variance by avoiding high-variance +EV spots, but only by reducing your overall EV. This is a very bad idea unless you are underrolled.

The higher your winrate, the less often you will lose, and your short term results (which are largely meaningless but most care a lot about them) will be less swingy.

It’s fairly obvious but I would keep that in mind.

By short term I’m talking about in the hundreds of hours played range, not weeks/months/years. That could be not so long or a very long time depending on how much you play.

Also keep in mind that even if your skill set never changes, who you’re playing against can change your EV a lot.

There are online crushers who have a higher winrate than most pros do in their respective live games, who break even/lose over 250,000-500,000 hand samples.

That’s more hands than most people will play in their lifetime.

If your winrate is pedestrian or for example you’re the third/fourth best player at every table you sit at—— you can lose for 20 years straight of recreational play playing one table of 25 hands/hr.

Don’t underestimate variance. Try to play your A game most hands.

Maybe if you measure in BB/h but not if you measure in BB/100. If you took the average live 2|5 pro and the best 500NL online player in the world IMO the live player would have a higher BB/100. If it were possible to breakeven live for 250k hands it would be pointless to even play as a professional. The only thing that makes live feasible to play professionally is the winrates that are possible.

Regarding the other point about players with higher win-rate having less swings, this is true on average, but the max EV strat, min variance strat, min swings strat and the min RoR strat will all be different.

The min variance strat would be to fold every hand. You will lose exactly the same 1.5BB every orbit for a variance/orbit of 0.

Show me a live pro with a 500,000 hand breakeven stretch

500k hands is like 5-6 years no?

^ maybe, if he played literally 40 hours a week nonstop for 6 continuous years.

Yeah- browni is correct. I was referring to bb/100. My bad, brain fart. It’s more impressive online, but that doesn’t matter in this context. So technically speaking, most live pros will have a much higher winrate.

However, online players can play up to 1k hands an hour where as live players are playing ~25 hands an hour. Sometimes more or less, depending on how many soul readers there are lol.

10bb/100 = 2.5BB/hr~ win rate. That’s higher than 90%+ of people’s lifetime winrate— including past results— so let’s go with that. This mostly discludes pros of course. But probably more relevant here.

You would have an 8% chance of losing over 100,000 hands iirc.

Which can be a lifetime of play for most live recreational players. Or at least several years+ even for the fairly serious recs. It’s a couple months for the average online zoom grinder.

tldr; A low variance style in most live midstakes games is going to equal a low winrate almost always nowadays (any pro will tell you this)—- which puts you at the mercy of variance to a much greater extent than you probably realize.

If you only play in extremely soft games—- then disregard everything but still play around with a variance calculator.

I've been thinking about this more and more lately and I'm actually not convinced this is true (even if we are overrolled). High variance spots are a long term mind ****. If you're a stone cold soulless computer, you'll do fine. But most of us aren't. The better you are at handling these spots mentally, then the more cool you are taking the higher EV & high variance line. But most of us probably don't handle the mental stuff nearly as good as we think we do (honest self evaluation is key), to the point where if we're mistaken in how we handle them then the EV we lose thanks to tilt induced poor play might actually not be worth it. There's probably a happy medium to which everyone will have to attempt to find their own personal sweet spot.

GimoG

If you want to make money and you don’t want variance, go get a job. A security guard can pull $16/hour. Night auditor at a hotel can probably make like $14/hour and it’s a cake job according to everyone I know that’s done it.

Poker is gambling. If you want to win money, you need to risk money


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I think GG's comments will help anyone become a winner and 95% of the players are not.

folding the small blind in a 6 way limped pot even though 7-2 offsuit is getting 15-1 odds might be -EV pre flop but overall calling with this is way higher -EV.

there are several spots where unless you log thousands of hours
calling all-in when your a 80% dog but have 21% EV might be plus 0.001¢ but is high variance for little gain and to most they will never reach the long run

I would much rather have the 79% EV hand here any day of the week

I don’t think there’s much argument here w/r/t playing utter trash in the sb. People take issue when he promotes blatantly incorrect advice that can basically be boiled down to “just play people worse than you”.

Also folding is never -EV, it’s definitionally EV neutral.


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The other issue is that yes, you can make an argument for the mental issues, but where do you draw the line? I mean, even though it's not a significant portion of my role, I'm not super happy making a 300BB call that offers +5BBs in EV, but if you're passing up getting it in pre for 100BBs with a PP after V shoves and shows you AKo, you are killing yourself with lost EV. That's a +10BB edge that most people wrongly call a "coin-flip."

Variance isn’t really a thing. 99+% of your decisions in poker CAN’T end up at EV because the outcome is binary and EV is not. Make +EV decisions at every available opportunity. /thread

For example:
AA vs KK @$200 effective and you hold up w/A’s means you ran $80 OVER your EV. The times when KK binks you only ran $120 under EV. If you play within your bankroll, stay true to your style of play and make good EV decisions in a vacuum every time, you’ll be OK. If, as GG mentions above, not running above EV will tilt you I would argue you should find a new hobby or improve your mental game. Avoiding +EV because you can’t handle it means you’re (almost certainly) destined to be a passive (poker) loser fish. Chasing -EV because you’re not afraid and instead an adrenaline junkie makes you a degenerate gambler. Try blackjack instead. As with most things in life, just make the best decision with the information you have and everything will be OK.

Random side story but my buddy once managed to get a guy to fold aces preflop. In no limit. It was like someone opened to 35 in a 2/5/10 pot and 4 people called and he decided to just rip KK for 1k from the sb and the 4th caller announced “fold” and showed AA. Rationalizing it by saying he “didn’t want to go home yet”

Cosmic justice existed that day and the dude went home with no chips.

But yeah, poker is a weird game where there’s a lot of people addicted to playing, but not so much addicted to gambling, hence you see these nits and semi-loose passive players all over the landscape, slowly bleeding away money because they’re scared of big pots


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This is why playing the right stakes is key. If Garick and I were playing NLHE heads up @ $2million effective stacks and he showed me AKo and shoved and I had AA I would fold the A’s because I can’t sweat the 13% chance of losing several million dollars. I would rack up and leave. Conversely if we were playing the same set up and Garick shoves AKo face up into my pocket 7’s but we’re $2k effective I have 55% of a $4k pot so I snap call, high five the dealer and thank Garick for giving me a free $200 because I’m playing the right stakes. Play the right stakes and ignore variance.

There are ways around it. Your goals aren’t everyone else’s goals. Neither are right or wrong. Help the people who want to be helped ignore those who don’t.

This is why so many people still elect to play mostly online. If you have $5k to your name, losing a buy in at 1/3 could be 10% of all the money you own. But it’s 200 buy ins at $0.10/$0.25 online. Losing a buy in is half a percent. Plus, now you can “play difficult spots”, and you aren’t worried that you won’t be able to buy groceries if it goes wrong.

GG would probably be served well to invest $100 into PT4, and $100 into ACR to grind NL2 for awhile. That is, of course, if his goal is to learn.


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+1

Completely agree about the BRM aspects here. If BRM is affecting your decisions then you’re not operating optimally. A lot of people suck at life BRM so no reason to think most aren’t great at poker BRM. Pride, addiction, ignorance, apathy.....

With regard to GG he’s been a winner year after year with (I believe) $100k+ net winnings, which very, very few people can claim. His style is effective (as evidenced by his results) and satisfying (as he clearly has stated). As such he’s ahead of 90+% of the people here. If his style and feedback doesn’t help you play your style better you can at least use his commentary to attack other players with his strategy better. I don’t understand why him playing the way he plays is noteworthy to so many posters on here?

There are several active posters in this forum who I know are definitely terrible at poker, will never get better at poker and Have nothing to add to my game. I ignore them but I’m glad they’re terrible because I have to win money from someone. Game over.

Deleted a couple of posts that are off-topic. This thread is about variance, not about how much nits suck or about the fact that the game changes over time, etc.

It is definitely not the your opinion of GG and his strategy thread.