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Variance or true variance ?
TheEdge949
Member Posts: 5,741
in Poker Chat
Hi all,
I was discussing variance with a non poker playing friend who is a complete maths geek and he floated a point at me and I just wondered whether or not it holds water.
He argued that whilst variance is undoubtedly a part of the game, it can only equalise out over say 100,000 hands or more if all parties involved are playing complete optimal poker, what he termed true variance . Otherwise he says that from a purely mathematical standpoint variance will never be 50 / 50 as the player playing optimally will make less mistakes and therefore be in a stronger position a greater percentage of the time.
When I tried to think it through my brain hurt.
Is he correct or just bonkerooni.
Mark
I was discussing variance with a non poker playing friend who is a complete maths geek and he floated a point at me and I just wondered whether or not it holds water.
He argued that whilst variance is undoubtedly a part of the game, it can only equalise out over say 100,000 hands or more if all parties involved are playing complete optimal poker, what he termed true variance . Otherwise he says that from a purely mathematical standpoint variance will never be 50 / 50 as the player playing optimally will make less mistakes and therefore be in a stronger position a greater percentage of the time.
When I tried to think it through my brain hurt.
Is he correct or just bonkerooni.
Mark
Comments
Poker pure optimal play isnt really achievable by humans.
I imagine Artificial intelligence could achieve it.
A player playing optimally could still get battered by varience, as I see it.
Varience has no memory so it doesn't know it should be evening out at a certain point.
Variance is simply being above or below EV, and it exists regardless of your edge. You can still be X buyins above/below where you should be regardless of how much you win.
If your EV is +10bb/100 and you're only winning 8bb/100 over 100k hands, that's still variance, and by the same token, there's variance if you're winning at 15bb/100 in that spot as well.
(NB: bb/100 = Big blinds won per 100 hands played, for those who are unaware. 10bb/100 is massive fwiw)
If everyone's playing optimal Poker, then it just means your EV is zero and any wins/losses for all players are purely the result of variance. What I think he's saying is that unless everyone is equal, your EV is never going to be zero, which is pretty obvious.
If someone's a weaker player, they can still run good and lose over time. It's just their upswing can be losing more slowly. The 'losing more slowly' is the result of variance.
If I play a large number of hands with a weaker player then variance is still going to even out over time. It's just that the evening out means both players' winrates gets closer and closer to where they should be (in terms of bb/100). If my EV is +10bb/100 vs a weaker player, then all that happens as I play an infinitely large number of hands is that my winrate converges to +10bb/100, because I get closer to winning 80% of my 80/20s, 60% of my 60/40s etc.