How to deal with poker variance; some general thoughts
by PokerAnon ~ July 23rd, 2008. Filed under: Philosophy and approach.
So variance will swing your poker winnings up and down. How much can you control these swings? How much should you try? How do you adjust or deal with these swings?
Ideally, you have
- a winning style and skill level for your level,
- sufficient bankroll to deal with variance, and
- the type of personality, the discipline, the confidence in your abilities, and the balance in your life to be able to maintain quality play
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Determining a winning style can take some time to develop at the beginning. Basic research into tight/aggressive play is a start, and of course understanding all the basics of starting hands, pot odds and bet sizing is a must. Still, looser styles can win for you, as can a nittier, tighter style if you know how to work with them. At the lowest levels a more passive style early in a hand seems to work better for me where preflop raises and c-bets have little effect on players who limp/call with anything from QQ to Q2o. If you’re going to focus on 6 max, multi table tournaments or turbo sit and goes, then your style has to take in consideration the differences between those variations. There’s a plethora of information on basic playing here in this blog, in books, and elsewhere on the internet.
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Bankroll, to me, comes in two flavors. There’s the cash bankroll, which should be more than 20 times the buy-ins for the cash tables that you play, or 20 buy-ins for sit and goes. There are other recommended ratios, and these are not meant as hard and fast rules anyways. If you’ve been running well and have accumulated 15 buy-ins, there’s no reason not to set aside a little and take a couple shots at the next higher level, just to test the waters. Or if you deposit $20 and depositing another $20 next month is not going to break you, then don’t feel that you can’t play $2 tables if you feel that you are really capable of playing them. But don’t go stretching the rules to the point of sitting down with $10 of your $20 bankroll at a single table. This is a sure way of going bankrupt. The only time to do this is 1) you’re playing with money that you really don’t care about, like play money or free money from a signup at a small site, or 2) you’re on vacation and decide to hit the casino. If it’s really not going to bother you to lose the whole thing because it’s free or because it’s part of your allocated vacation spending money, then it might be okay.
Those 20 buy-ins are there to help you to deal with the swings that variance will cause. But there’s another bankroll that is important and that’s what has been called your “emotional bankroll“. If you really stress when you lose one buy in at a cash table, then maybe you’re playing at a level that’s too high for your emotional bankroll even though you have 30 or 50 buy-ins. Tilting, or being afraid of losing because it might cause you to tilt, will lead you to be too afraid of getting your chips in when you only have a slight edge. At low levels you might be able over the long term to still get away with this as your edge over the weak players might be substantial, but as you move up you need to be able to take advantage of every edge that you have. You can’t win your share if you’re playing with scared money.
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Poker is played by humans, against humans. As such, the quality of our play is subject to affects from our level of alertness, our moods, and our emotions. Having a sufficient bankroll, both cash and emotional, is a method to help mitigate the effects of tilt, but one definition that I’ve heard of tilt is “anything that causes us to play sub-optimally”. Presumably that does not include lack of knowledge or skill, but anything that causes us to play sub-optimally given our individual potential playing ability. By that definition, being tired would be a form of tilt, or having the dog scratching at the door to go out, or being frustrated from the lack of good cards, or getting angry over a bat beat.
Here’s just a few tilt-mitigators:
- quiting for the day after a bad beat, before you go on tilt
- quiting for the day after being down a predetermined amount
- taking breaks; even if you’re in a tournament it might be worth your while to sit out a few hands
- switching games, from cash tables go and play some sit and goes, or vice versa
- switching to another game; from NLHE play some Razz or Stud
- drop down a level for a couple of sessions
- get your hands reviewed by another player; this will not only give you confidence you’re not playing badly, but it will also help you to be improving your game even while your bankroll might be struggling
- make sure your winning expectations are reasonable to begin with. You may have started running hot and are just now experiencing some balancing-out. A good win rate is in the neighborhood of 7 big bets per 100 hands or 14 big blinds per 100 hands, but anytime you’re winning as much as the rake is taking you’re doing fine.
- multi-tabling; if you can do it without a substantial drop in the quality of your play, multi-tabling mitigates your variance by 1) increasing your sample size faster so you get closer to your “true” winning rate faster, and 2) keeping your attention so you don’t get bored. Not everyone is capable of multi-tabling successfully.
- work on detaching yourself from your poker game. This is the crux of “Zen and the Art of Poker”
When your confidence flags and you’re aware of your frustration, it’s time to step away. Take a break. Pick one particular aspect of your game, design a way to work on it, and go to the play money tables or lowest levels and focus on that one aspect. For example, try the bet/raise/fold exercise, or try playing with a sticky note on your monitor so you can’t see your cards to work on your hand reading.
It’s no fun to lose, but don’t let poker become a detriment to the rest of your life.
