Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaUlater
mpethy, can you clarify whether playing nitty is lower variance?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ashley12
Wouldnt mind seeing the numbers of this or a rough confirmation if this is true, and under what parameters.
I just cant see how some old nit playing 9/3 is ever going to have more variance then someone like myself who is playing a lot more hands, raising more, and having to compensate for not having much postflop as often as him by bluffing more and taking thinner edges.
Yeah, I can confirm. I am, myself, a convert to "nit is the highest variance style." Lag being the lowest variance style has been empirically common knowledge over in the online forums since, oh, 2009 or 2010. I didn't believe it when I was first told, but my mining and some PTR mining has validated it.
Basically:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Garick
I don't have a dog in this fight, but that is what mpethy's database mining shows. Kind of counter-intuitive, but it makes sense when you think about it. Lags play a lot more small pots.
What we're talking about here is maybe not the technical definition of variance. I dunno. But we're talking about having big swings in session, and big swings among sessions when we say that lags have fewer and smaller swings.
As Garick said, it's counterintuitive, but the logic is straightforward, and easiest to explain if we simplify.
Suppose you have an ubernit who plays AA, KK and QQ. His results in a session are going to depend entirely on playing those 3 hands, which he can expect to see once each 7 hour session. So, hypothesize a high variance losing session--his aces get cracked, his kings win the minimum when an ace flops, and he loses a medium pot with QQ. He's looking at 150bb in losses, plus -40bb in blind losses, so he has a -2 BI session.
Now suppose a winning 25/20 lag has those same results with AA, KK and QQ. First, by being a winning lag, he cuts his blind losses from 1.5bb/orbit to maybe .75 or .8, so he only loses 20bb there. In addition, he is playing a bunch of small pots for an average win of maybe .5bb or 1bb. So in a session, he will win, net, 55bb or so.
So the same bad luck that an ubernit experiences as a -2 BI downswing, the lag will experience as a -1.15 BI downswing.
So, someone might argue that the lag is more susceptible to variance because he's in more and thinner spots. But the difference is that a lag is in spots where luck is not the determinative factor in the outcome, but skill is. Any moron can win a big pot with aces, and most everybody loses a biggish one every time they get cracked. Lags are more willing and able to control the influence of luck on their game by the application of skill, such as turning their aces into a bluff when they have been cracked but the river looks super dirty for the other guy, or just turning a 0EV fold from a nit with K3s on the CO into a 1.5bb blind steal.
I mean, you can't really be sucked out on when you isolate a limper when you're in position with 74s. It's a skill play that isn't really susceptible to luck one way or the other to the same extent holding AA is.
Basically playing nit means you have to have a hand and have it hold, and you usually expect to play a big pot.
Being a lag means you don't have to have a hand to win, you don't need it to hold, and you aren't usually playing a big pot.
All of that said, DHCG makes a valid point about the lack of FE being a complicating factor in comparing live and online results. My gut would be that everybody's live variance is higher, but that the order would stay the same, simply because lags are playing a fundamentally different--non-showdown--game that simply is not as susceptible to big swings as a nit's. but that, anyway, is just a guess.
