If you spend a lot of time discussing hands on poker forums, with friends and fellow players, or with a poker coach (or, like me, with poker students), there’s a certain type of thought process with which I guarantee you’ve come into contact. It goes a little bit like this:

“Well, I could have called villain’s shove here, but I figured the best case scenario is that I’m flipping, and I don’t really want to take a flip at this stage. If I fold I still have 30 big blinds and that’s plenty to work with.”

There are a number of flaws in this logic – each one worthy of its own article – but I want to focus purely on the idea that ‘taking a flip’ is a bad thing. Oftentimes, this mentality comes from an unfamiliarity with the true reality of poker – that it is a game with a higher level of variance than most professionals would care to admit – and oftentimes it comes from other mental game issues, but the most common root cause is simply a natural, human fear of the unknown.

Whenever we leave things in the hands of variance, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that makes us uncomfortable. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why it’s important to spend time overcoming this fear of variance if you want to progress further in poker.

It’s Built Into Poker’s Infrastructure

Everyone’s accustomed to referring to variance as ‘part of the game’, but that’s not really the full picture – variance is the game. Poker is a game of infinite possibilities, where every scenario is different. In every hand, the variables change – the board cards, your hole cards, the stack sizes, etc.

Unlike chess, for example, where the starting and ending point of each game is always the same, a poker game is not beholden to any given structure. Indeed, there exist an almost infinite number of poker variants with different rule sets – the chips and cards being the only things in common.

When most people think of variance they think of coin flips, bad beats, all-in situations and big suckouts, but in reality the definition is a lot broader. It encompasses everything that ever happens at a poker table – the variations in the cards that get dealt, the changes in the ways people play, the random instances of dealer mistakes or outside influences affecting the game, and anything else you can think of.

You can measure variance in any number of ways, but the bottom line is that there’s absolutely no avoiding it unless you avoid poker altogether, and even the world outside poker is full of variance in its own way.

Most of the Time, You Can’t Even See it in Action

The truth about variance is that most of it falls into one of three different categories, which could be defined as three ‘levels’ of variance. The first and most obvious is the surface-level or ‘level one’ variance – the obvious stuff, the coin flips and coolers and preflop all-ins and flush draws hitting on the river.

These instances are, overwhelmingly, the ones people usually complain about, because they’re the most evident and therefore the easiest to remember. This has the side effect of making them the ones that stick in your mind the longest when you lose, if you have some weaknesses in your mental game.

The second level of variance is a little less obvious – ‘level two’ variance involves an understanding of both our own and our opponents’ ranges in specific spots, because it mostly comes down to which part of our opponent’s range we run into in each spot.

When variance favours us, we might experience a situation where the top of our all-in three-barrel range runs into the bottom of our opponent’s calling range, and we win a huge pot – when it doesn’t favour us, the opposite happens and we lose.

The interaction between our ranges and our opponents’ ranges over time, and the edges we create with the decisions we make, are what help us to ensure we profit in the long run.

Finally, ‘level three’ variance is the stuff that happens over multiple hands – you won a big pot one hand, and that created a situation where you could double up through a big stack for a massive pot the next hand, for example. Or, conversely, you lost a big flip and that led to you busting the tournament next hand with 99 versus TT.

It could also be said that variance in our decisions or our opponents’ decisions falls into this category too – when our opponent makes an uncharacteristically bad play that they usually wouldn’t make, that’s variance working in our favour.

It can be used to your advantage

It’s crucial to recognize that one of the biggest advantages of making our peace with variance as poker players is simply that so many other players struggle to do so, and this gives us an edge over those players. If our opponents are going to make mistakes as a result of an unwillingness to risk their whole stack on a coin flip, we’re going to benefit massively.

By removing our fear of variance and embracing the need for fluctuations in the game situation, we can actually create additional profitable situations that wouldn’t otherwise exist – it’s hard to build a big stack in a tournament without a little help from variance, for example, and winning big cash game pots can give us the opportunity to sometimes play very deep-stacked against weaker players.

Ultimately, variance affects all poker players, and there is some variance in the extent to which each individual is affected. Some players run really hot their entire careers, and some run really cold. We might end up in either category. We don’t control that.

To assume it’s easily possible to ‘hit the long run’ and outrun variance is naive, but to attempt to avoid variance altogether makes profit impossible. We can never guarantee a positive outcome, but getting over our fear of negative outcomes is a big step towards progress.