The Different Forms of Tournament Poker Variance

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People talk a lot about the concept of variance in tournament poker. The majority of the time, it’s assumed that people are referring to the results of preflop all-in confrontations, but in reality, there are many more different kinds of tournament variance that should be taken into account when considering whether you’re running ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In reality, there are simply so many factors at play that it’s often extremely difficult to judge whether you’re actually running above or below EV, so I hope that this article will give you a little more motivation to stop thinking about how lucky or unlucky you might be, and start focusing on ways to adapt your game selection and in-game decision-making to reduce the degree to which variance affects your results.

Preflop all-ins

Obviously, this isn’t the only type of variance, but it’s a big one. Generally there are three kinds of preflop all-ins – the ones where you’re ahead, the ones where you’re behind, and the coinflips. In order to win tournaments, you generally need to win all three kinds of all-ins pretty regularly. I doubt there’s ever been a tournament won where someone didn’t either win a coinflip, have a pair such as AA hold up against a lower pair, or crack a higher pair such as AA with a lower pair.

A coinflip can be the difference between getting 10^th place and going into the final table 1/9, or it can win or lose you a lot of money during a heads-up match. It stands to reason that the ones where you’re behind are the ones you want to avoid the most – no-one likes to get it in bad – but there are also plenty of situations where getting yourself into a coinflip situation isn’t the best idea either. You might want to think twice about whether you want to just 5bet/call off with Ace-King for 60bb deep in a soft tournament, because you’ll probably have 0bb just as often as you will 120bb.

People often try to measure their ‘luck’ in preflop all-ins by using the all-in EV function of Holdem Manager to prove how far under EV they’re running, but it’s a flawed system of measurement. I do think I have some math that explains this but it might be completely wrong so I need to work out the kinks before I publish it anywhere. Essentially though, the chipEV function of any poker software is massively skewed by the pots that had bigger chip denominations in them – you could lose a pot of 20k chips at a final table that costs you a lot of money, but a pot of 200k chips early in a $1 rebuy turbo would cost you next to nothing and show up as much more important – and the EVbb/100 function seems to tell literally everyone over every sample size that they run under EV, so I am convinced that it is also a flawed way of measuring all-in variance in tournaments. I don’t think anyone should ever try to measure how good or bad they run anyway, though, as it’s just a recipe for going crazy trying to control something you will never be able to.

Card distribution

This concept refers to the hands you get dealt in the first place. The idea of being ‘card dead’ in a tournament is one that you’ll hear frequently, and what it means is that a player is simply going through a patch of being dealt hands at the lower end of the distribution of possible starting hand combinations. On average, you should get pocket Aces around once in every 221 hands. If you get AA twice at the same final table, that’s a pretty great example of ‘running good’ in card distribution, one that almost no-one ever thinks to consider when they complain about how unlucky they are.

If you don’t get 99+ AQ+ once in 20 hands, you’re running marginally bad, since that’s roughly the top 5% of hands. Being ‘card dead’ might not even necessarily constitute a lack of premium hands – it might simply be that you’re not getting the 87s or KTs hands that you can enter pots with, or that the hands you’re folding simply seem worse because they’re in the bottom 20% of hands instead of being spread across the bottom 60%. Think about how frustrated people get when they get really terrible hands, particularly in live poker – for some reason it’s more tilting for a player to get dealt 93o, 62o, 74o and T5o in four consecutive hands at a final table than it is to get KTo, 22, A5o and Q8s, even though there are plenty of situations where all four hands in both groups would be easy preflop folds. It really makes no sense to think of card distribution this way, so try to step away from thinking about the hands you got dealt before or the hands you might get dealt next, and simply think about what % of hands you would be playing in each given spot, and in particular what % of hands your opponents are playing, even in hands you’re not involved in.

Range placement

This is a fairly simple idea – sometimes your opponents have the top of their range, and sometimes they have the bottom. It’s commonly referred to as getting ‘coolered’ when they have the top – for example, when you have KK, it’s pretty standard to get it in preflop almost always, but you recognise that some percentage of the time the villain will have AA. This is simply you running into a hand that was, in this particular instance, placed at the top of your opponent’s range. Conversely, the villain might have had the bottom of his range in that hand, and snapfolded to your shove, or a slightly lower portion of his range, and snapped you off with QQ.

The concept works for your ranges too – consider how lucky you might feel when you 3bet shove pocket fives and get called by pocket fours. In reality, you simply had one part of your range and the villain had another part of theirs, but the fact that in this particular instance, you had a hand that had 80% equity could very easily change the course of the tournament. Postflop, maybe you made a very marginal bluff that resulted in villain folding because he happened to have the one combo draw hand that missed the board and ended up with Queen high, whereas on other turn or river cards or other portions of the villain’s range he may have snapped off your bluff and busted you from the tournament. Every play in a tournament only has to work a certain percentage of the time in order to be profitable, so when you do make a bluff that gets snapped off by a weak hand, consider the spot holistically and try to think about what portions of the villain’s range would have folded, and you might get a better perspective on how good or bad your bluff was.

Behavioural changes

This is an underestimated factor, for sure. If you are constantly in a different state of mind when you sit down to play poker – you play after work, or you drink alcohol while you play, or you have a tilt problem, or you just don’t concentrate hard enough – then you’re opening yourself up to yet more variance. You’re accepting that a certain percentage of the time, your decisions are not going to be optimal. Maybe the 20% of the time that you play when you’re too tired, you punt off a few stacks each session – how much could that cost you in the long run? And what if your biggest shot at a major final table comes during one of those sessions? In the short run it could cost you even more if you run bad and you end up feeling like crap when you make that deep run in the Sunday Million. Of course, you can’t always control how you feel once you’ve started playing poker, but it does mean that you shouldn’t play poker if you’re not in a state of mind to make optimal decisions, and it’s yet another reason to work extremely hard on eliminating mental game issues from your game.

Playing styles

If you play a particularly aggressive style of poker, you’re going to open yourself up to more variance. That’s something you will have to accept. If you’re going to risk big chunks of chips more regularly, then you’ll have a big stack more often, but you’ll bust earlier too. Conversely, if you play a tighter style that involves more flat-calling, postflop play and small pots, you improve your chances in each particular tournament simply by decreasing the likelihood of risking all your chips in any one hand, especially when deepstacked. The more you 3bet preflop, the more people are going to 4bet you, which means the more you’re going to have to 5bet them, and so on – eventually if you’re aggressive enough, you’ll have to start putting large numbers of big blinds in preflop with marginal hands, simply in order to avoid turning down profitable spots, and this will undoubtedly result in you occasionally punting a solid 50bb stack deep in a tournament. This doesn’t mean you should be a nit, it just means that in the long run, if you play hyper-aggressively in every single tournament instead of picking your spots, you’re going to have bigger upswings, but bigger downswings as well.

Tournament characteristics

Lastly, the different factors that go into making up a tournament are a huge influence on long-term variance – field size, structure, toughness of field, and potential ROI. A tournament with 1,000 players has a higher variance level than a tournament with 100 players, so field size is important. However, a tournament with 1,000 very weak players might produce a higher ROI that could offset this variance, making it a good investment nonetheless. It stands to reason that usually the tournaments with the biggest and softest fields are the lowest buyins, and vice versa – so while it may be tempting to play a higher-stakes tournament because it does only have 100 players, it’s important to take a good look at the lobby before you register, because if most of those players are good regs and it’s a $109 buyin with a turbo structure, your 5% ROI that makes you $5/game in the long run could be doubled by playing a $22 buyin where you have a 50% ROI. The $22 might have a bigger field and a smaller overall prize pool, though, so which do you play? That’s just a choice you need to make. Are you comfortable with playing $109 tournaments in general? Can your bankroll handle it? Are you feeling 100% on top of your game right now? What’s the structure like?

Personally, I would always choose slower structures and a bigger ROI, although it’s important to achieve a balance. You’re never going to have a shot at really big money – and perhaps hurt your overall $EV and/or hourly rate – if you stick to playing really low stakes even when you can afford to play higher, so you will need to learn to tolerate some degree of variance. You will also have some huge downswings if you only play turbos or you only play higher-stakes buyins, so the choice is yours. Ultimately, I like to bear in mind that the only money that really matters in poker is the real money you actually have, not the theoretical dollars you never see a cent of, so if I’m feeling good, I have money in the bank and I’m not worried about making next month’s rent, then I don’t mind a higher level of variance in the short-term. Maybe I’ll win a Sunday Major somewhere and bink huge; but if I’m deep in makeup and trying to win my way out so I can cash out some money soon, the last thing I want to do is play higher and potentially sink deeper. Downswings are like quicksand – the more you scramble to get out, the stronger they pull you in and the deeper you get. I hope this article will help you to understand tournament poker variance a little better, and to recognise why minimising it is usually a good idea.