Running bad is a phrase that you’ll often hear from poker players who have been experiencing variance or bad luck. Sometimes in poker, it feels like the cards are against your odds and you can’t win a hand. You can go for weeks or months without winning, taking a significant hit in your bankroll. Such periods are known as poker downswings or variance, and every avid poker player will experience them at one point.

So, what’s Poker Variance?

In poker, variance tries to estimate how much a player loses or wins based on luck. To help understand poker variance, consider this example. If you flipped a coin for 50 times, then you’d expect to win 25 times. If you won 30 times, then you’ve got positive variance. However, if you won 20 times, then you have a negative difference. Generally, in poker, you’ll be pursuing a minimal edge, and the spot may not come up often. In such cases, a little bad luck can do a lot of damage to your variance.

Our minds tend to be a bit pessimistic, and we notice bad luck more than good luck. As such, first-time players might feel confused to discover that they’re still losing money no matter how well they play. 

“I’m I getting poor at playing or is the deck just in favour of other players?”

Are You Running Bad or just imagining things?

Though poker is a skill game, there’s a random element to it. Undoubtedly, you’ll keep on experiencing variance throughout your career in poker. Sometimes, you may be on a lucky streak, and your winnings will be higher than you expected. Other times, your winnings may be under the line due to bad luck or what many poker players call running bad.

To know whether you’re running bad, you can start by tracking the number of big blinds won versus the played hands. That’s especially enlightening in poker tournaments where high stakes and late comebacks can overwrite the losses and exceed the earnings in several solids during the early stages. You can even use automated software to analyze the hands you play and get to see the numbers.

Game Selection and Variance

When it comes to variance, your game selection matters a lot. For instance, your variance can be enormous when you’re playing poker tournaments. That because not every big blind is created equal in tournaments. It’s true that there are people who make a living from tournaments and they love it, but you must not that most pros are value hounds. 

Professional poker players understand that the more the field is extensive, the higher the variance. As such, they keep their buy-ins low and maintain small fields. Additionally, they play regularly and know that the smaller the tournament, the more likely they’re to reduce the negative variance.  

The problem with major tournaments is that they are challenging to run deep in, though they offer lots of fun when playing. For instance, if you’re playing in a 100 or 200-player tournament, you should expect to run deep continuously. However, if the field numbers are in thousands, it might very hard to run deep, unless you’re fortunate. As such, the variance that you’ll experience will have oversized effects on your results.

How to Combat Variance

To reduce your variance, it’s wise to try and diversify your poker portfolio. When I was starting in professional poker, I was lucky enough to win several large online tournaments, and that encouraged me to continue, though the prize wasn’t tremendous. Nonetheless, the results were purely based on luck. Since then, it became a personal opinion that players should diversify their portfolio in different ways based on their time.

For a start, try spending 80% of your gaming time with cash games, 15% on small field low-stakes tournaments and 5% with moon shots. You can also get involves in one big poker tournaments at the end of the week, but make sure you’re not attempted to play more than once. Keep in mind that in gambling, you’re paying for a little excitement and an experience. If you’re lucky enough to be profitable in the process, then so be it.

The reason it’s advisable to spend most of the time with cash games is straightforward. In cash games, all big blinds are designed to remain equal, assuming you won’t regularly change the limits. As such, it doesn’t matter if you’re running poorly over a short period. 

If you’re winning, you can continue playing until the variance starts to swing in your favour. That’s far more difficult to accomplish when you’re competing in a tournament. Additionally, cash games frequently play deep-stacked. That teaches you how to play turns, flops and rivers. However, that’s a very difficult feat to accomplish while competing in tournaments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2020 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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