Should you look to reduce variance in poker?

Posted:November 2011

I have been involved in many discussions down the years on the subject of variance and one such topic is in reducing variance voluntarily to make your life easier. There are strong connections with risk and reward and it is assumed that to get the greatest reward then you often have to assume the greatest risk.

But yet in the process of trying to get the greatest reward then you must experience loss at a level that you may not find palatable. This is the key issue because in poker then you are faced with loss on a daily basis. Some people can just take this while others cannot. So to answer the question of deliberately playing tighter to reduce variance then I firmly believe that it is correct to do so for an awful lot of people.

This could be people with very little experience and exposure of playing poker. It could also be people who have a very small amount of money to risk playing poker or it could even be players with low risk profiles. Whatever the reason, it is clear that reducing variance is key for millions of players. Many people would argue with that but I simply don’t see how you possibly can.

This is because poker isn’t just played for profit. Let us look at an analogy here with driving a motor car to show what I mean. If you had to drive on the motorway between two fixed points then you would obviously arrive at point B driving at 140kph faster than if you were driving at 80kph. This is really a given - but, is the solitary requirement for that journey to get to point B as fast as possible? If it isn’t, then there is little point in breaking speed limits and risking a driving ban or being injured or even killed.

It is the same with poker. Millions of players the world over have no use for optimal poker strategies that increase win rates if in doing so they simply cannot handle the variance that comes with it. So to answer the question of whether or not you should reduce variance then it all depends on what you are trying to achieve with your poker and where you are as a player. It is a mistake to simply blindly copy others.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

 
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