Some poker game sessions are very good. Other times I may go home wishing I never sat down at the table to start with. I really enjoy those times when it seems no matter what I do the right cards fall and I win most of the hands I play. Of course I am unhappy when it seems I did everything right and the wrong result happened.
Winning too fast, or losing too fast is of one of the fundamentals of poker. Playing poker it is not how many hands you win in a session, but rather optimizing the hands you play to win as much money as possible from the hands you do win. Forget this concept, and you end up winning or losing quickly in a session, and losing over the long run.
There are times when I play when I am lucky to win one out four hands I play to the river, yet overall I am making a lot of money. There are other times when I play a lot of hands and I also win a lot of hands, but I am barely holding my own as far as staying on the winning side of poker.
One of the tools experienced poker players use is to monitor their variance. Poker not played well results in having a very large amount of money invested in what is essentially a poker game where you should lose much less. Managing, or reducing that amount is managing your variance.
According to a site, icoachmath.com variance is defined as: Variance is a statistical measure that tells us how measured data vary from the average value of the set of data.
That may sound confusing if you are not a math person. I think of this as measuring or monitoring at certain times whether I am ahead or behind, and by how much. It is not uncommon to sit down at a poker table and win at a very high rate, sometimes three or more times the normal expected win rate of a good player. The opposite happens too, where a player finds themselves losing at the same rate.
When I play poker when I like to use variance as my poker gas pedal. If I am winning or losing at a rate much higher than normal I know my variance is over my average variance. When this happens I start to analyze what is going on. Is the opposition that bad, or that good? Am I getting more than my normal share of winning or losing hands? Am I making dumb mistakes and it is time to leave the table? Keeping tabs on reasons for variance at the poker table, helps keep your chips in front of you, and not in front of another player.
I also keep tabs on my variance in my life too. Life runs in cycles. Some days or weeks are very good, some days or weeks are terrible, though most days and weeks flow without any real ups or downs. It is when the variance in my life is quickly rising either on the upside or the downside that I stop to think about what is happening in my life.
Occasionally, especially when life is going well, we forget to keep an eye on ourselves. The same thing happens when life is not running so smoothly. In both instances it is important to recognize your variance is much higher than normal. When life is going smooth there is little variance in our day to day life, and we need not pay attention to our variance as it is about where it should be at any given moment.
When our life is not going that well, our decisions are sometimes made for the wrong reasons and do us more harm than good which sends our variance plummeting downwards from an already too low point from where we would prefer it. Our decisions are made out of frustration, childishness, not thinking of long term consequences, or just because. Later when our life slows down and we start thinking again, we realize that we were responsible for making a low point in our life worse than it had to be.
Check on your variance daily, and if it is going down, slow down and think of what is going on and how you can keep it from going lower. Spending some time thinking about what to do is a lot better than trying to fix problems from acting without thinking.
