[omgwtfnoway]

TNixon, that's my blog you quoted. unfortunately the logic in that post isn't sound and i have a better understanding of variance now.

you're making a common mistake in that you assume small stack poker is necessarily high variance. the results of large field turbo tournaments have high variance because of the number of players and the skewness of the payout structure; your largest tournament cashes will have values extremely far away from your expected value in the individual tournament.

in hu nl cash games you similarly have individual results that are very far away from expected value. A player with a solid 10ptbb/100hands edge on his opponent will frequently play pots for 200+bb if they are both playing aggressively.

Based on his winrate, the player would expect to win .1 bb on average from that 200bb pot. Do you see why this will cause high variance?

so large field tourneys and short handed nl cash games have this in common: most of the individual results fall very far away from the expected values based on winrate. This is the source of variance.

small stack poker is actually very low variance. when you play husng you can only win or lose one buyin at a time. assuming you are a solid 60% winner your results can only deviate from your expected value (roughly 15% roi) by at most .85 buyins.

contrast this to the examples where you win a large field tourney (for 100+ buyins) or stack your opponent in a 500bb+ cash pot.

small stack, hu, freezeout poker is the lowest variance form of poker.