One of the more common sayings at the poker table is one that has always really annoyed me: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
What does “lucky” even mean, anyway? I personally deem it to be a word created by leprechauns and state lottery executives to give people a reason to believe that maybe one day they’ll catch their big break. You hit the jackpot you say? You must be the luckiest person in the world!
False.
What people perceive as “luck” is actually called variance. Variance is a measurable constant, subject to regular laws of mathematics and not some arbitrary phenomenon of the universe. Contrary to what you may believe, you didn’t win the random drawing at your son’s high school basketball game because you are blessed. You were simply the beneficiary of positive variance.
Variance can apply to anything in life, but it is a very popular term among serious poker players. According to professional poker player and author Mike Caro, variance is “A measure of the spread of a statistical distribution about its mean or center. With respect to poker, the distribution of your results over a set of hands or sessions, or the swings in a positive or negative direction of cash flow. The greater the variance, the wilder the swings; the lower the variance, the more likely a given session results will be close to one’s average result.”
If you play perfect, optimal poker then your variance will be based on the times that the “odds” or the “distribution of results” go in your favor. For example, if you’re all-in preflop with pocket aces against pocket twos you should expect to win 82.2% of the time based on mathematical probability. When running the hand 10 times, though, there’s no guarantee you’ll even win half of the time. Should the aces win only four out of ten times, you’re experiencing what is called negative variance, or “bad luck”.
Over a much larger sample, the distribution of results will even out to where they should be and those holding the aces will only be tearing the hair out of their heads less than 20% of the time. This is proof, however, that any numbskull that sits down at a table can win on any given day. It’s the same reason you can walk into a casino and turn $100 into $10,000 at a blackjack table. Or flip a coin 10 times and have it always land on heads. Anyone can have a string of “good luck” as long as they hit a period of positive variance.
The true test of a great poker player is surviving through a stretch of negative variance without letting it affect how they play. One thing remains certain: If you play better than your opponent, you will take his money. He’s not “luckier” than you if he beats you over the course of one day. Or two or three. Just make sure you keep him coming back. The higher the volume you play, the less variance you’ll have to elude in order to be a profitable player.
false.
There is a such thing called luck