This week the Online Poker World Championship brings for you professional advice about what is variance and how to deal with it, given its ineludible presence at the tables and poker tournaments played everyday, even yours.
Understanding Variance
Variance is likely to be one of the most feared aspects in poker, as it can turn its back at you any time. Well that sounded kind of creepy, but it certainly is one of those scary aspects of poker. You see, even though poker is a game of skill and the best players will always win long term, you have to take notice for that one word – long term. None of the players I've talked with can actually define what a long term means. Some say 1,000 tournaments, while others measure it in hours played; but one thing can be said for sure: there isn't a single player in the world that can assure he hasn’t been touched by variance. It all comes down to how well you can handle it and to be honest, there aren't many people who can claim to be great at fighting with variance without some serious extra effort put into learning how to do it. This will help you to make more money and also climb the leaderboard in our Poker Ranking.
Keep Calm
It might sound like a really easy task to accomplish, but in reality, remaining calm while losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars might be somewhat hard to say the least. Anger starts to burst out with every pot you lose and if there are plenty of them in a row, it might be quite overwhelming. This will induce the so called tilt and when you start to go this road, the worst things usually happen.
How can this be avoided? That's exactly the topic for this article. We'll concentrate on various pre-game aspects that can be used to avoid playing when tilted and limit the damage that is done. We can tell you from personal experience that most money in poker is lost exactly when players are in this mindset. Let’s take a look at how we can avoid this from happening in the first place.
Setting a Stop Loss
The very first thing that you should do is setting a stop loss. This relates to a limit or maximum amount of money that you are comfortable to lose before it begins to really affect your style. Don't level yourself into thinking that losing several buy-ins does not affect you at all, no one is free of these emotions. Just figure out what's your limit – how long are you able to concentrate on the game, before money starts to affect its quality. We would advise something between 5 and 6 buy-ins is a good stop loss for you. Given that you follow our bankroll management recommendations; this won’t cause serious damage to the health of your bankroll, while at the same time it's more than enough to understand that this day might not be your day to join the tables.
Taking a more careful approach to managing money
One of the best ways to avoid getting angry or tilted is by managing your bankroll with more caution than usually advised. The thing that sets people up the most is losing a large portion of what is in their accounts; it makes them feel uncomfortable and start to worry about going broke. We know this really well, because we've gone through all of it ourselves. Instead of using the standard 20 or 50 buy-in rules for the limits you are looking to play, change it to 100 buy-ins. Losing 5 buy-ins with this new strategy won’t even be perceived, on the contrary it will greatly improve the quality of your overall game, which will eventually lead to having large profits and increase the amount of fun you have while building a deep roll.
How Table Selecting can help you to fight variance?
Here's something that you maybe didn’t consider until now: selecting tables and hunting the bad players will highly decrease your variance to the point of reaching a minimum rate. You see, when you play against bad players, you hold a really large advantage regardless of what the type of the game is. Vice versa, when you play good players who are equal to you in terms of skill, your edge is non-existent thus variance will be huge.
Try to play at the best possible tables (with the most players under your skill level) when you get involved in either SNG Tournaments or Cash Games take a lot of time to mark and write notes on other players. It will certainly pay back long term. If you don't have a bankroll yet, try our free Poker Sponsorship of $10 at Winner Poker.
