These “good and bad days” are the variance. Of course, they don’t win their money evenly they have good and bad days. Their win rate is, therefore, $100 per 100 hands, or 20 big blinds per 100 hands. On average, they see between 30 and 35 hands per hour, resulting in around 5,000 hands per month.Īssuming this player plays $2/$5 and regularly makes a profit, they earn $5,000 per month from playing poker.
Let’s do just that!įirst, let’s take a fictional professional live cash game player who plays an average of 20 days per month and around 8 hours per day. Even without ever having heard of normal distributions or the central limit theorem, variance in poker can be explained through examples. It involves a small dose of mathematics, the same science that makes our cars run, our smartphones work, and our satellites not fall from the sky.
Variance is not a dirty word, but for most people, it’s a relatively undefined concept.
