Football bloody football

Not my words but the words of my missus. Its only a week into Euro 2008 and she is getting restless already. She just cant comprehend me watching so much football and every country being foreign…..its totally alien to her.

Then I remind her of all the soaps that she watches and she dont know these people either and it aint even real unlike the Euros. Actually I am glad for a break from the poker although my work never ends these days as I have far more writing and promotional work to get through and now I have my “apprentices” with PP. Just wish that they would stop tooling money in with mediocre hands.

Anyway, I have been saying that I was going to include some tutorial material in these blogs and I have decided to do that here and the subject is reducing variance in poker.

Variance is the silent killer. Sooner or later you will encounter a bad negative run and when this happens, it can and will literally tear you apart mentally. This is why many professionals go for a reduced earn rate in order to lower the variance.

There is a lot to be said for not always making the correct mathematical play. In this instance then it is no different to BJ when you make cover plays on say roulette. You know that the cover plays are losing money and -EV but the reasoning behind them is to increase your life span.

Also in poker when you fold marginal (in most cases they arent so marginal anyway) hands then quite often you were buried anyway and when you were ahead then you could still have been outdrawn and when you are behind then you are buried. I am referring to cases here where you open raised with KK for instance and the flop comes 3-3-6 and the turn card is a 7 and your opponent re-raises massively all in. In most cases you are looking at pocket sevens, sixes or a hand like A3s and sometimes 5-4s.

What you are not looking at is a hand that your kings can beat. Sometimes those kings will be good but whether they are good or bad the fact remains that the variance is shooting through the roof the more times that you get all in. Now I am not advocating folding big hands all over the place but you can see where I am getting at here…..well I hope you can.

Anyway….take care and see you soon

The Dean is sponsored by Pokerheaven and can be seen at www.pokerheaven.com/thedean