Understanding Variance in Poker: The Key to Long-Term Success

6 min read

Every poker player has been there: you make all the right moves, calculate your odds perfectly, and still watch your stack disappear. Welcome to variance, the invisible force that separates skilled players from those who tilt away their bankroll. Understanding variance isn't just about accepting bad beats—it's about leveraging this knowledge to make better decisions and protect your long-term profitability.

What Is Variance and Why Should You Care?

Variance in poker is the deviation from expected values that occurs naturally whenever statistics are involved. Think of it like flipping a coin: even though we expect 50-50 results, you might see 60 heads and 40 tails over 100 flips. The more times you flip the coin, the closer the outcome will be to the expected value of 50-50, with 10,000 or 100,000 flips showing results that align closer with the true 'win rate'.

If you have a true win rate of +5 BB/100 and a standard deviation of 90 BB/100, your short-term sessions will swing wildly above and below that line. This explains why even world-class professionals can experience brutal losing streaks. In 2021, Fedor Holz lost $1,500,000 despite being one of the best tournament players in the world—a stark reminder that variance affects everyone.

The Mathematics Behind Your Swings

Understanding poker odds requires grasping the relationship between expected value (EV) and variance. Expected value represents what you'll win on average over thousands of hands, but variance determines your actual short-term results.

In one simulation, a player ended up with winnings over 25,000 big blinds after 2.5 million hands but had to deal with a nasty downswing of almost 10,000 big blinds between hand 1.2 million and hand 2 million. That's a winning player experiencing a 10,000 big blind downswing—far beyond what most recreational players would expect.

Standard Deviation: Your Volatility Measure

Typical standard deviations range from 70-80 for tight passive/full ring players, 90-100 for standard TAG/6-Max players, and 120+ for loose aggressive/PLO players. Your playing style directly impacts your variance: the more aggressive and loose you play, the wider your swings.

Your results will typically fall within 2 standard deviations of your mean about 95% of the time. This means if you're a 5bb/100 winner with 100bb/100 standard deviation, over 100,000 hands you could realistically be anywhere from a massive winner to break-even—and still be playing perfectly.

Tournament Strategy and Variance: A Brutal Reality

Tournament poker presents unique variance challenges. Large MTTs will have much more variance than SNGs because you expect to win far less often. In a 1,000-player tournament, even if you're the best player in the field, you might only win 2-3% of the time—meaning 97 out of 100 tournaments end in failure.

In tournament poker, evening out the variance can take a lifetime or two, explaining the phenomenon of how the world's best players can go years without winning a major event. This isn't a skill issue—it's mathematics.

ICM and Variance Amplification

The Independent Chip Model (ICM) adds another layer of complexity to tournament variance. Buy-ins in more challenging events often are so high that they take up a high dollar value of overall tournament buy-ins whilst often being a much smaller number in terms of events played, further amplifying the variance.

The 100BI rule is far too aggressive for most large field MTT's. Tournament players need significantly larger bankrolls than cash game players to weather the inevitable swings. Many professional tournament grinders recommend 200-300 buy-ins for large-field events.

Cash Games vs. Online: Comparing Variance Profiles

A live player winning 20 big blinds per 100 hands demonstrates significantly better win rates than online play, where 2.5 big blinds per 100 hands are already considered a decent value. However, online players can combat variance through volume.

In one example, an online player played 20 times as many hands as the live player and still struggled with more intense variance. If 100 of these players sit down and each play only 5,000 hands, 44 of them would lose—even though all of them are good players.

Hand Analysis: Making +EV Decisions Despite Variance

Let's analyze a common situation. Even premium starting hands like pocket aces (AA), while strong, still have a roughly 77% winning chance against a single random hand pre-flop, meaning they will lose approximately 23% of the time in that scenario. That's nearly 1 in 4 hands lost with the best starting hand in poker.

The Power of Expected Value

The key to beating variance is consistently making positive EV decisions. Consider this example: you're on a flush draw facing a river bet. A flopped flush draw will come in approximately 1 in 3 times by the river, thus in order for a call to be +EV the final pot must be larger than 3 times the call.

When calculating whether to call with AQ against an opponent's shove: EV = (.47 * $13) – (.53 * $11) = 6.11 – 5.83 = +$0.28. Even a small edge of $0.28 per hand compounds significantly over thousands of hands. Over the long haul, players prioritizing such decisions build a sustainable advantage, steadily growing their bankroll and profits, with this disciplined approach mitigating short-term variance.

Practical Strategies to Manage Variance

1. Bankroll Management Is Non-Negotiable

If you are a winning player at your limit, 30 buyins is certainly enough to handle basic variance, but if you play long enough, there is certainly a chance that you could encounter a 10 buyin downswing, even through no particular fault of your own. For a solid winning player (5bb/100), a 20 buy-in downswing is standard.

Conservative bankroll recommendations:

2. Track Your True Win Rate

If you're unsure of your win rate, start with a conservative estimate—say 3–5 bb/100 for solid small-stakes winners. Use tracking software like PokerTracker or Hold'em Manager to analyze your long-term results. If you've ever played around with a poker variance calculator, you'd find that it takes tens of thousands of hands before you can see a statistically significant edge materialize.

3. Avoid Tilt at All Costs

Many poker players succumb to tilt when on a downswing due to fear of losing more money or a desire to win back previous losses, and tilt can be very dangerous since decreasing your win rate will result in greater variance. This creates a vicious cycle where emotional decisions amplify your downswing.

4. Focus on Volume in the Right Games

The more hands you simulate, the more accurate the projection, with variance smoothing out over volume—10k hands tells a story, but 200k tells the truth. However, playing more hands in games where you're not a significant winner won't help. Game selection matters more than volume.

The Mental Game: Embracing Uncertainty

The truth is that variance in poker is far beyond what humans are capable of truly conceptualizing. This is precisely why so many players struggle with it. Understanding variance transforms tilt into perspective.

Variance is a natural part of poker, and it can be tempting to get frustrated or demoralized during a downswing; however, it's important to remember that skilful players will ultimately win out in the long run, so keep your focus on making good decisions and playing solid poker, and trust that your results will improve over time.

Leveraging Variance Calculators

Modern variance calculators can simulate millions of hands to show you realistic expectations. At 5 BB/100 over 200,000 hands, your 70% confidence range might be between +40 and +60 buy-ins. Understanding these ranges helps you determine whether you're running bad or playing bad.

The Bottom Line

Variance isn't your enemy—it's the reason poker remains profitable. It's not a bug; it's a feature: without variance, weak players would never win, and the game would die overnight. The key is accepting variance as reality while consistently making decisions that maximize your expected value.

Variance defines your short-term reality, while skill defines your EV, and bankroll management is what keeps you in the game long enough for EV to show up. Master all three, and you'll not only survive the swings—you'll profit from them.

Remember: in the short term, anything can happen. In the long term, math always wins. Your job is to make the mathematically correct decisions and let the law of large numbers work in your favor. That's not just good poker strategy—it's the only winning strategy.