[TNixon]

Ok, I know I've asked this numerous times, but never really got a satisfactory answer.

Common wisdom says that the swings in HUCASH will be bigger than in HUTRNs, that the variance in cash is bigger. Intuitively this makes sense. It is very easy to prove mathematically that variance goes down in freezeout tournaments as the number of entrants is reduced, and although I don't know how you'd go about proving it, it does make sense that variance goes up on cash tables as the number of participants goes down.

So, heads-up should be the lowest variance form of freezeout tournaments, and the highest variance form of cash, which would lead to the belief that cash is higher variance than tournaments.

What I can't figure out is why this would be true.

In regular tournaments, there are situations where a +chipEV situation could be -EV, because of the payout structure. In a winner-take-all setting, these situations never occur, and chipEV is exactly equal to realEV.

There are differences between the two, of course, but the differences ought to cancel each other out.

In tournament play, if you lose a big chunk of chips, the player can't just leave and take away the opportunity to win them back, but in cash play you can reload, making it that much easier to get them back.

In tournament play, the blinds grow, but what that really means is that you're make higher variance plays as time progresses, and in cash play, you can afford to be more patient, and play like you would during the early stages of a tournament.

Please, somebody explain. Not understanding this bit of conventional wisdom (while also being unable to completely buck it in my mind) is bugging the crap out of me. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The only possibility I can really think of is that heads-up is a meeting point of sorts, where the high variance of tournaments meets the low variance of cash tables, and heads-up just happens to be in the middle, with the variance being equal.

Obviously I've got too much time on my hands, to think about this issue as much as I have.

[img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]