Friday, August 19, 2005

Variance or Randomness

Another banner evening last night. I had a chance to play in the 1K guarantee last night and was chip leader with 6 to go... A couple of bad plays with mid pocket pairs and I was down a bunch... Final hand... 5 handed... I'm in the BB with ATs... folded to button... who goes all in.. I barely have covered... what do you do?

I called.... Dang... He had AK... what... T on the flop.... victory is mine.... what K on the river... I'm all but out... went out on the next hand.. Bummer!!

I was also killed on the ring tables.. The question of the day is what is the difference betweeen variance and randomness. Are they mutually exclusive? Are they subsets of each other? Or is one just a smaller piece of the other? Let's talk it out. Randomenss is what is what it is. Your starting hands are slaves to the random number generator. I'm not even going to begin with a conspiracy theory about how online poker is rigged. I am in the camp that these sites have too much to lose if it were discovered that random number generator wasn't indeed random. At the same time, I don't know what kind of regulation is put upon these sites that are all over the world. We'll leave it at random is random. We should get the same amount of good hands as bad hands. Last night just happen to be a bad night.. I played a little over 170 hands last night and didn't get AA, KK or QQ. The good news it that I did get JJ once and even hit my full house; but lost to 66 who hit quads.

Now what exactly is this variance thing that we speak. Is it just simply the swings that we are going to experience playing poker?.. meaning our good hands are going to hold up some time and somtims they are not? Maybe it is just a way of us justifing our bad play (I'm pointing at myself by the way). Truly, our bad sessions might have some bad beats (I was rivered at least 6 times last night).. but at the same time, I bet it is inter-weaved with donkey-ish play. Obviously, the JJ hand was my biggest loser and I don't think there was anyway of getting out of that one... but my next 3 losers involved A2s, A3 and Q9s (ironically, my A3 lost to Q9 with Ace on board)... so I'm sure I had my reasons for playing those hands.... So again, what is variance? I really don't know.

I didn't play any HU nor did I check in with everybody.. I wasn't in the best of moods... lol.

I have a home game tonight and tomorrow is another home tourney. Tomorow is a $100 tourney with about 20-24 guys. I'm not the best of live players (or online as things have been going lately).. so I'm a little tentative about tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.

2 comments:

TripJax said...

May the felt be with you at the live game (and online for that matter).

Good bloggin' Will. Glad you are now one of my daily reads...

Jordan said...

I'd go with Randomness is the short term hand. It's random that you are dealt Jc9h. It's random that the flop is As2s3s.

Variance is the long-term effect of individual randomness. It is variance that says that if you play x amount of hands, you will have AA x amount of times, KK x amount of times and so on. Variance is almost a constant, which is ironically made up of randomness. When randomly generated scenarios are built up to the point where a pattern is recognizable, you have your variance, which ranges from 27o to AA. You know basically how often you'll get each over the course of the game. And in the end variance becomes equal.

Randomness does not become equal, because it is so short term.

I'm pulling this out of my ass, but damnit, it sounds good.

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