Variance

[sweetjazz]

Dean, I have played about 500K hands of limit HE online lifetime, though I have never played above 30/60 except for <1K hands in some really soft games. In fact, I have played primarily 5/10 - 20/40 limits. My worst downswing was 420BB, and that was in November at 30/60 6max.

Here's the thing: if you are playing in a game where your edge is > 2 BB/100, it should be pretty rare to hit 500+ BB downswings. That's not to say that they won't happen, and indeed it is likely that some players in this category
will hit them, but it will be a minority. I attribute most of my lack of a severe downswing to playing in very soft games, so soft that they make up for my weaknesses as a player and still allow me a comfortable expectation. I also am fortunate, because even with this good game selection, I could easily have had worse downswings.

But it's very hard to win 2BB/100 or better at higher stakes games. The soft games where you can achieve this winrate (and certainly there are times when you have a theoretical edge > 2BB/100 at certain high stakes tables) don't run very frequently. And as your theoretical winrate decreases, the size of downswings increases very fast. Depending on what assumptions you make, I think a 1 BB/100 winner should expect to experience ~500BB downswings on a fairly frequent basis (probably about once per 100K hands), and sometimes those will collide against each and produce a really big downer.

If you think you can win 2BB/100 in the 100/200 game longterm playing on a fairly regular basis, I think you are probably kidding yourself. This is not based on your specific abilities (which I don't know), but the fact that such judgments come from either being one of the greatest LHE players in the world or from being a very good player who has run above average to date. It's much more likely (without knowing anything about you) that it's the latter.