No Limit Hell

No limit did not welcome me back with open arms.

I feel good about my play, and yet I lost.

Why?

I wish there were something to be gained from this losing. The moral always seems to be the same: gain a greater understanding of variance, and all will be well in the long run.

Well, sorry. I don't understand variance at all.

I was thinking about this last night.

In limit poker, I figure about two-thirds of players are losers and one-third are winners. A losing player, by definition, will continue to lose over the long run. That means that if he plays long enough, he will go bust. The opposite is true for a winning player -- if he plays long enough, he will make a lot of money.

OK, that's obvious. But this is where variance comes in. Variance keeps the fish happy. It's like fish food, feeding them and feeding them and feeding them until they become bloated and die. They make easy prey for other predators, or, more likely, the toilet bowl.

Variance is hard to comprehend because I know I am a winning player. If I'm a winning player, then why have I been losing?

The only explanation I can come up with is that variance is continually higher than I expect. I make tens of thousands of little decisions each day at the tables, and I expect those small marginal edges I have to add up to something. I expect QQ to beat AK about 55 percent of the time. I expect top pair on the flop to hold up most of the time. I will see a showdown with two pair, even vs. a threatening board. I will call down with A high heads-up vs. a non-threatening board and a very loose player who won't fold.

I believe these are universal truths. If I follow these maxims, the money will come to me. It always seemed that because of the large number of decisions involved over a single poker session, those small edges I can exploit will add up. After all, if you flip a coin 10 times, it can come up tails seven or eight of those times. But if you flip the coin 10,000 times, you'll come extremely close to a 50 percent distribution between heads and tails.

Possible explanations for losing streaks:

1) Variance is higher than the odds.

2) Although I may make tens of thousands of decisions per session, there are only a few decisions that are better decisions than my opponents would make.

3) Everything I know about poker is wrong.

4) I'm clueless.

If anyone has any thoughts, please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. Also, I'd love to read a discussion dealing with variance from this perspective, either in a book or on a Web site.