This is not a post (in principle) for people who have never played poker, although if you read it you will surely have a good time (if you like this game). If you are advanced, you will get more out of it, but if you are a beginner, you will surely enjoy it. This article is about variance in poker and how to deal with it to keep a cool head in the long run. Do you dare?

But right off the bat, it sounds hard to know how to work with variance in poker if you don’t know what it is. For this reason we will answer the question that many of you will be asking yourself: What is variance in poker? Variance means the probability that the most likely event in a poker game (or anywhere else) will not come to pass. As? Let’s go with an example:

The green player wins 40 out of 90 hands in which he participates. But today he has played 90 hands and only won 20. Does that mean his ratio is not 40/90? No, it means that this ratio occurs in the long term, and at this moment he has only earned half of what he normally earns. This is known as variance.

Variance in poker. What teaches us?

The first lesson of this concept in the mathematics of poker is that this game has a component of chance, but it is much less important (in the long run) than in all casino games. Why else are there always the same players (or almost) in the tournament finals? The other lesson is that it is a long-term game, where specific results matter very little.

Now, the poker variance has no memory. Therefore, the player in the previous example should not play like crazy expecting that in the next game he will win 60 of the 90 hands in which he participates just because of variance. Or yes, but he shouldn’t trust it. In the next game he will still have 40/90 as a reference, and in the long term he will have towards that value.

How to deal with the variance?

Alright, now I know what variance is in poker. Now what do I do with it? Very well, there are psychological rabbits so that this deviation from the probabilities does not affect you negatively, and there are others that directly affect your decisions. Let’s go there:

Cool Mind: Ok, you lost to a player who made the game. First, humility. Have you done everything right? What can you improve? If that hand has been spotless on your part… patience! Think that thanks to these hands weak players keep playing and you can win. Although in most cases it will be the first and you will have something to improve.

Stability in the choice of games: If you always play tables with similar blinds or cash with similar prizes and buy-ins, you are less likely to have a negative effect on variance. On the other hand, in a very big tournament you cannot afford a losing streak, because you will be out. More constant and moderate prizes to prevent variance in poker.

Do not change your game after a bad result: The game is different depending on your situation at the table. But just because you lose a hand doesn’t mean you have to be super-aggressive. Control and apply your style of play, and don’t do crazy things to recover what you lost with a bad hand. The best thing is not to compensate, it is for everything to return to normal, and continue playing with the patterns you played.

Variance in poker is not an omnipotent monster

This advice is one more to more, and goes to collation of the first point. Modesty! That you make a bad decision is not the variance. That you have not calculated the odds correctly is not variance. Or not making a correct decision out of fear is not either. A frequent mistake among newbies is to go from not knowing this concept to attributing all their losses to it.

And probably not so. Don’t use variance as an excuse in poker or an explanation for all your bad hands. First of all, check your game and see what you can learn, that way the worst that can happen is that the win rate goes up. The first step to improve is knowing how to find weaknesses, if you attribute everything to the supposed variance and you will stagnate.

A perfect way to practice to improve said game and look for failures, but also to manage bad streaks are some offers from bookmakers. Because on many occasions these bets will lead you to go against intuition and it will take time to practice to be sure of it.