haha that made me lol

60k on a 100-160 abi is super super std. with 5ks and 1ks and like said above sundays it's really normal. if you wanna go look at all the really hs regs doggz that play 100-200 abi's you will find almost all of them have had around a 60k downswing at some point.

edit: also, no a bigger roi isn't what cuts downswings down in coops where your sample is 100~ tournaments a year.

bigger ROI typically comes with bigger fields which adds to the variance, not lowers it.

Take someone with a 10% Roi playing 1000 player fields. If you double both the ROI and the field size, expected size of the downswings decrease. If you 4x them ala COOPs, the size of downswings decrease further. 8x them such as the sunday million and the size of the swings is less than half of the first examples.

your ROI isn't doubling with field size. You mentioned 4xing them for COOPs for example; I doubt your ROI is 4x as big in a 1k WCOOP as a 1k Super Tues. Even with the bigger fields, you have to factor in that every single good reg in the world is playing during WCOOP, fields will be tough towards the endgame, AND that the AFS is massive, jacking up variance. It's not as simple of a proposition as: 4x the fields, 4x the ROI! You never see the long run in these tourneys (losing a flip with 15 left in a WCOOP 1k might be the most important $ pot you play online in the span of 2 years) and there's a reason why Seabeast and others rightly refer to SCOOP and WCOOP especially in the post-Black Friday world as potential career-killers---career-makers for the lucky few, but the impact of these series can be felt for months for both backed AND unbacked players.

Even your typical Sundays are big enough and expensive enough now that running bad in them can create downswings like that pretty easily. Do I disagree that most people make massive regging mistakes? No. Are most people not winning as much as they think they are? Yes. But I find your proposition that 60k downswings at 120 ABI a "once-in-a-career" outcome ludicrous. It's not as simple as you're trying to make it out to be. I don't think you'd find a single person who plays high-stakes who would think this out of the ordinary.

I agree with the first part, that someone playing huge buyins (and thus a huge range in buyins) is going to experince worse varience than simulated samples because he has the lowest Roi on the high end of the tournaments he plays - even negative sometimes. I was trying to make a point that if you are experiencing a 60k swing maybe you shouldnt reg a few of the toughest/highest tournaments you've been playing because that swing may not be all 'varience'.

But the edit: two identical good players playing tough HS schedules, one doesnt play COOPS, one plays COOPS (not including super tough 2k+ events). The person who played the COOPS has a lower expected downswing size for any given year.

I was merely trying to show that ROI decreases downswings at a higher expotential curve than fieldsize increases it.

But you dont think a player with a 10% ROI in the Super Tuesday could have a 40% ROI in a four thousand player WCOOP field? Ok.

100K+ downer atm, online only. running like **** for the past 4 months. Feel like my edge is big enough in the HS MTTs but cards are just not falling the right way.
I don't think anything is NOT possible in terms of amount of BI's you can loose in poker. if I could have run bad the past 4+ months, then why can't I run bad the next 4? Every day starts at 0 basically, so theoretically it should be possible.

Variance is so insane and the luck factor in every single tournament is huge. Not a single person winning a $200-1K tournament for over $100k isn't running INSANELY well. Mo-Friday fields are pretty winnable consistently, but the FTOPs,COOPs and Sundays are one big bingo festival. A nice festival, if you run good .

People forget that when they decide to call a 3bet OOP with 9Ts, and the flop comes 678r, it's nice to be up against an over pair instead of a A2s or 44 and not get action. Or when we 3/5b w.Ax suited, villain indeed had garbage. Because even that might be in his range, so are his premiums. Or the times they someone does slowplay AA villain doesn't hit a set, 2p or huge combo draw etc. Variance comes in so many different forms, almost impossible to calculate what is truly possible.

If you play HS MTTs online, post BF (not sure if it's worst because the fields where bigger pre-BF or better since the fields where softer), I would like to believe (else i suck) 60k downswings are pretty normal/standard and not hard to get in too.

Still enjoying this thread as always. Nice posting everyone.

Agree with everything Shane has said basically. Idk how to express it right now bc i'm really tired, but the math and running even 1000 instances or w/e doesn't really correlate to real life experiences necessarily (even though, yeah in an ideal world it should). There are so many determining factors that positively and negatively affect HS regs individual variance. You're averaging out peoples ABI and ROI, but if someone is playing a lot of the most upperpart of their BI range as mostly turbos (which happens a decent amount i would suggest), then this is obviously going to have a neg affect on short term roi as you're covering ground in your lower ROI games faster than your high ROI games. If that makes sense. I want to say something about the variance extremities in HS turbs/lowROI games vs reg speed/high ROI games and how that affects outcomes in short term samples pretty extremely, but I can't put it in a coherent state right now.


I can agree with the bold part, but it is also one of the better ways to increase your potential future roi by testing yourself out in these tough fields and learning from mistakes you make. If you are blindly just regging and not learning anything from your mistakes then yeah sure. But there are cases where if done correctly, it's fine, even if it will increase your short term variance quite significantly by playing something your negEV or BE in.

The italics part confuses me. Maybe this is a complete average thing? What if you had a thousand players identical playing each schedule, what is the Standard deviation between the two? I would think that you're going to get far more extreme results one way or the other with someone playing the COOP schedule than the other. I would actually think more people would take 100k DS playing all of the COOPS than the person not.

Maybe I'm just wrong. You clearly have far more experience in the numbers etc than I do so I trust your numbers. It just differs quite considerably to how I generally perceive HSMTT variance in the real world.

Yeah, even though situational variance is factored into ROI's, I've always been of the belief that it is FAR more significant than people even care to think about. Also, I have no idea what is possible with stuff like this bc it is so ridic hard to measure. But it's sooo huge and probs biggest element of hidden variance.

Also, any HS regs majors or big runs are so important to your overall variance. If you lose AA to KK on FT bubb of Millball for w/e infinity amounts of equity, it's so unlikely you will ever recover that or reach the "long term" of that scenario. Hell, who knows, you could do it twice really and you would never ever balance out that equity in your career.

There are just soooo many factors to variance that can cause it to be extreme in one way or another. It's just so hard for me to trust simulations or w/e.

Obviously the player who plays COOPs has way bigger downswings then the other player. This is not even a discussion. He also has the chance to make HUGE score. But the amount of luck needed for that doesn't have to come in a lifetime of playing.

In most player cases I believe that past experience cannot be correlated with future expectation since the variance is so high. Only the very highest volume players with relatively low AFS and low range of buy-ins can have a good idea of their future expectation and even then the changing nature of the game can impact such predictions (because almost all "winning players" ROIs have been compressed over the past few years due to higher proportion of regs vs recs and more turbos).

The length and depth of downswings experienced by some unfortunate regs have clearly got worse over the past few years and are only likely to continue to get worse (I expect we'll see 1000ABI downswings reported sooner or later).

The above, and some of the real-world downswings reported in this thread, are certainly depressing for a low-volume player like myself (although fortunately I've not played poker for a living or for any significant portion of my income since summer 2009).

It certainly puts my recent modest downswing into perspective: -160 ABI at $119 over 324 Stars MTTs since 1 May feels very bad to me, but having read this thread it could still get a lot worse (since I just play in my spare time, most of my volume is turbos + large AFS Sundays; also no time to study/improve my game so likely my "expected ROI" gets worse as time goes by).

It's funny because I chopped a $125 live tourny in Montreal for a few $k recently and the guy I chopped with was saying how he preferred live now because online is so tough. We all think live variance is much worse because of lack of volume, but if your expected ROI in live tournys is 5-10X online (which it certainly is for the same ABI in my local tournys) then it might not be so bad.

True but online you could play 20x more volume in the same a time frame and don't have the extra (higher) costs (transport, food etc.).

haha very true, my friends and I often talk about how Mon-Fri is just about trying to make enough money so you can afford to ride out the highs and lows of Sundays/COOPs. The variance is jacked up so much in those series and those days---how much $ you take out of MTT poker will largely be determined by them AND the big pots you play in them. This isn't cash where situations are repeatable dozens of times; the $ equity in pots is so ridiculously massive deep in tournaments and you simply don't see the long run. Some pots can be worth upwards of 100k $ in equity even in an online tournament (substantially more in an EPT or WSOP etc) and you may never see that kind of spot again. Long story short: MTT variance is ridic and we're probably all gonna go crazy in the end by playing them

Could be because people overestimate their ROI or because when u start a DS it becomes a vicious cycle that decreases ROI and increases variance.

there's so many ways to reduce variance but most MTTers don't bother with it.....cut out hyper turbos/turbos esp the higher buy ins, game select better, try to find smaller field MTTs with good edges..........you may sacrifice some profit but sanity/avoiding risk of ruin is greatly underestimated.

Everything mjw has said on this page is spot on and I think he understands variance (good and bad) way better than most people.

no. you all make it this way cause glory is more important than money. (which i support. glory is 100% more important than money)

lots of glory to have in the 11r on party where i got second yesterday

Its not about the money, its the bracelet!!!!!!

I'm curios , since everybody has realized how bitchy could be MTT variance, wich kind of bankroll would you like to have for higher stakes?

Most of my friends/regs i talk to have 2k buyins or something, yet i don't get how can you not go crazy if a 500+ buyins swing is std.

I'm wayyyy rolled and swinging like 400-500x , just the fact i need to reload every day/find a way to work around deposit limits etc crush my mind. And my life probably wont be crushed even if i lose 500 more buyins, and i have a child and an ex-wife(wich trust me, it's worse then every swing).

WTF how the hell can someone grind 80-100 abi with 200k-300k if you keep swinging 50-60k every 3k mtts?

<3 teambowlcomp

but yeah i prolly would go crazy if id just play sundays/coops. just be a solid and hard-working grinder and the money (and glory?) comes by itself (i had 2 loosing months in the last 2yrs and they were both laughably low) Its basically just a matter of how much variance u wanna expose urself to (and you can choose how much that is, by regging the 13ko and 5q eg)

^^makes sense. (I know the 13ko and can confirm it helps, lol)

Mixing in PLO and Omaha8 tournaments is the best thing one can do to lower variance, if not wanted to grind cash or SnG's beside the MTT-schedule, imo. Also very motivating and productive in general to learn and play other variants, esp for _COOP- and FTOPS-Events.
Fieldsizes of mostly 50-500 players and softer competition make up for nearly the same ROI for good players (+40% isn't rare), and ofc variance is much lower.
Though, this only works for small and midstakes grinder, since highstakes PLO/O8 rarely run. Lets see what the new PS-schedule will offer.

^

I probably play as many bowlcomps as you probably just an higher abi , man i would sign for just a losing month a year lol