Well here is my second update on my progress and it has been a very profitable few days. I have only played 46 SNG’s since my last update. I achieved a totally un-sustainable ROI of 49% at the $50+4 level making a playing profit of $1,225 over 46 games. I’ve had many distractions so far this week as I have a 2 week old baby that deprives me of sleep and together with working a 50 hr week makes it a challenge. I am confident in been able to play 125 in total by the end of the weekend so I can keep my monthly target on track. My overall stats are now:

Games : 757
Average Stake :$23
ROI: 12%
Profit: $2,448

My site bankroll now stands at $3,233 with bonuses included.

This week I have started paying a lot more attention to building my stack early enough to take advantage of the bubble as it is much easier to win heads up if you start with a significant chip advantage (you can survive a few bad beats then!) which in turn makes a huge difference to the ROI as first place pays $175 and second $75 for these tourneys. Previously I think I have been too passive in the middle stages of the tourney’s and would then have get a bit lucky on the bubble as I would have a similar or smaller stack to the other players. I now play a much more aggressive game from the 100 blind level and bully a lot more if I have the chips on the bubble. Sometimes it backfires but generally it seems to be working well. This may seem to be a basic concept for experienced SNG players but it actually takes a while to train yourself to do it if you don’t normally play like that.

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Given that I experienced a decent whack of positive variance so far this week it got me thinking about how to lessen the impact of the inevitable negative variance when it arrives. My Sharkscope graph shows fairly regular ups and down over the first 700 sng’s with similar intervals between the peaks and troughs. Now people with strong statistical and probability skills will probably laugh at what I’m going to say next however I will discuss it anyway. I’ve completed a science degree so I have exposure to university level statistics and calculus but I would not describe myself as being proficient with statistics, I definitely preferred calculus to stats.

Now I appreciate the theory of independent trials in probability; that is if you win one hand you are not more or less likely to win the next one however it is fair to say that long runs of both positive and negative “luck” definitely occur in Poker as they do in other games that have an element of chance. The following discussion is probably more philosophical than mathematical but I need to get it off my chest.

So I thought to myself how much my ROI would increase if I was able to drop down levels when I was clearly getting hit in the face with –ve variance and then jump back up when I believed I was coming out of the bad run. Now clearly it would never be a case of been able to pick the exact top and bottom of each cycle however I think it would decrease my bankroll variance and hopefully improve my ROI if I was at least partially successful at it. So further to this I have a question which may sound stupid but it is this:

Do people think variance is linked to time or number of hands played?
For example does the fact that you stop playing for a week mean that the negative variance has passed or do the poker gods only keep track while you’re actually playing hands and you are required to play through it?

I have noticed over the last few years while playing online that there are times when you just cannot win a coin flip your high pocket pairs get beaten by sets etc, these are obviously the times of –ve variance. If you are a winning player it always passes and then you hit the other end of the variance equation and poker is easy again. This phenomenon is very obvious while playing the shorthanded SNG’s and am getting better at detecting when it is occurring which helps me control tilt and also keeps me playing my A game when things are running really well as you seem invincible sometimes.

This leads me to another question:

If you are confident that you are experiencing a bad run of variance or luck whatever you want to call it, do you change the way you play to limit the amount of coin toss situations you take your chances on?

I had a period of about 200 SNG’s recently while playing at the $30+3 level where I just seemingly could not win a coin toss or even a 60-40, I also lost consistently with two unpaired over cards to the other players two under cards in heads up situations. I recognized at the time that I was running incredibly bad and therefore did not let it get to me too much, in fact when I started to win in these marginal situations again I took a chance and moved up to the $50+4 level with fantastic results as I was then playing into a segment of positive variance. This may have been just a lucky time to change over however I did feel as though statistically I could not keep losing to these the horrific beats I was taking.

Well I will see how the poker gods treat me for the rest of this week!