For my 500th post I wanted to focus on something that I think most beginning and intermediate players simply do not understand. Variance and how much this game can suck over the short term.

There have been posts like this before, I know, but I think the dead horse needs beating in this instance. I have been reading a lot of posts lately about how people are running good/bad or are "beating" a stake. Then they post a graph with 2,000-20,000 hands and think this is a good sample.

Its not.

Let's take a look at some graphs that include 10 players each with the same winrate and standard deviation.

Graph #1: 10,000 hands is not a good sample.




Graph #2: 50,000 hands is not a good sample.




Graph #3: 100,000 hands is not a good sample.




Graph #4: 500,000 hands is a better sample.




Graph #5: 1,000,000 hands is an okay sample, but still isn't going to tell the whole picture.





Graph #6: 2,000,000 hands.. now things are becoming clearer.




Graph #7: 10,000,000 hands. Okay, now you are probably pretty close to knowing your true winrate. But oh wait.. you probably learned something over the past 10 million hands. Please start over so we can see how good your really are. See you in 10 more years.

Each graph is based on 10 players with the same winrate and same standard deviation. I used http://pokervariancesimulator.fr/ to create these. Money won per player is in the left column and the graph is a visual representation of each players winrate.

Notes:
1. One of the most important things any player can learn is that shit can happen for a long long time.
2. Positive variance over the short term (<500k hands) can make us think we are better than we really are. (see http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ath-t9214.html)
3. We need rakeback to keep us going during negative variance.
4. We need to focus only on making good plays and forget the results. (stop looking at PT/HM every 30 seconds!)
5. Over 100k hands we can be winning players and either make a buttload of cash or lose our ass if we don't exercise proper BR management.
6. Even over one million hands we still could running 50% under our true winrate or 50% over it.
7. (I will add to this as people comment.)

So now that we know we have no control over variance no matter how good we are, all we have to do is apply this knowledge to our games. How do we do this?

Feel free to either discuss the subject or post links to other posts who have addressed issues related to this.