More Intro...

Of course my initial experiment with on line poker was a disaster so I started reading up and found Poker School Online.  The main pro there is Al Spath who laid out some of the big mistakes new players make.  Number one was that they play too many hands.  I started focusing on the play chip games on Full Tilt poker and there was introduced to the concept of variance.


Variance is the difference between how much money you expect to win on average over the long run and the results you are seeing in the short term.  Poker is a game of situations and decisions.  If you had perfect information on every hand, there would always be a correct and incorrect decision every time it is your turn to act.  But, poker is not a game of perfect information so you have to make an educated guess and rely on probability.  Over the very long term, making the "probably" correct decision on situation after situation will lead to winning at the game.  However, variance steps in in the short term and accounts, for example, that 30% of the time when your very strong hand will not win the pot.  Now, when I say long time, I'm talking VERY long term.  I mean years and years and 10's of thousands of poker hands.  Any examination of results on a shorter time frame and variance is going to rule.  For a more detailed discussion on variance see a nice article here.


On a session by session time frame, the effect of variance is huge.  However, I did learn some things early in my training that helped me get a small handle on the issue.  The biggest of these was playing Fixed Limit Hold'em.  Fixed limit, by definition, will only allow you to bet a set amount on any given street.  In No Limit Hold'em getting a strong but second best hand will often (especially for beginners) result in loosing their whole buyin in one hand.  The betting structure in Fixed Limit makes this disastrous result much less likely.  So, while variance strikes just as frequently in any form of poker, it's effect on your bankroll can be diminished somewhat (especially for beginners) by playing Fixed Limit.


Understanding variance helped me to decide to become a Fixed Limit specialist and provide me the apparatus to learn the game and get some handle on the risk involved.