Had a question from a Mr Del Petty yesterday who asked me about variance in poker and how many buy-ins a player needed and specifically how this impacted during bad runs.
Q…….Firstly I have to say that there are far better people more qualified than me to talk about variance and standard deviation in poker. But however, this is a very complex subject because you can never properly define it, all you can do is give broad general guidelines at best.
This is because you are playing poker in a forever changing environment where profitabilty of the games is constantly changing as players come and go. Your emotional state impacts your game as well and so does your skill level. Another factor that makes a big difference in your level of variance and whether or not you hit that third SD is in how aggressive your game is.
This is never more highlighted than in limit hold’em, in that form of poker at the lower levels then 250 big bets may be enough. But as you move up and go against better players and play in far more aggressive games then 250 big bets is no longer enough…..and this is presuming that you are a winning player to begin with.
But your earn rate is directly proportional to your standard deviation as the more you earn the less your swings are because of the fact that you have a skill advantage. So a break even player at NL100 will encounter more swings than a player who wins at say 5BB/100 on average.
Noticed that I said on average, a player who wins 5BB/100 could be doing so in a very aggressive style and the break even player may be just nut peddling. So what this means with regards the number of buy-ins that you need at NLHE ring games is that all you can do is pin point this down to a range.
It also goes on how each individual player accepts risk and how much risk they are prepared to take with their bankroll. If your desire is not to go broke then I would say that you would need 20 buy-ins as an absolute minimum even if you yourself were a very tight nut peddling player. As the number of short stacking players increases then this also changes the dynamic as well because a fair percentage of the time you will be getting involved with a player who only has a small percentage of the number of chips that you have and this impacts your swings once again.
In this answer I am also assuming that Del is buying in for the maximum and not the minimum or something inbetween. Then depending on your skill level, game aggressiveness and the overlay that you have in the game decides on how many more buy-ins you will need.
For low stakes games…..20-30 should suffice but dont take that as gospel and merely use that as a rough general guide. Once you start to move up and your value is marginal in many aggressive situations then 50 or more buy-ins may well be required. So as you can see I have not really answered anything here but that is because some questions in poker are so damn difficult to answer.
I have often said that variance in poker is perhaps the biggest enemy that a player faces becauses it impacts on you emotionally and messes with your head enough to make you think about doing strange things with your game…..it really is the silent enemy.
See ya soon and take care
CAKE POKER……THE SITE WITH ONE ON THE BEST RAKE DEALS ON THE NET AND THE SITE THAT DOES NOT ALLOW TRACKING SOFTWARE.
The Dean can be contacted at Carl@Pokerquest.f9.co.uk for all poker and gambling related matters and for coaching.
