Variance and Looseness

[h11]

People usually say that tight play in hold-em lowers variance, but I recall reading the opposite, that when playing few hands it's easy to miss a few big pots in a row, leading to large variance. Anyone know the correct answer? (I searched, nada)

[MCS]

The lowest variance you could have would be never to play any hands. Then your variance per orbit would be zero.

Where did you read that playing tighter increases variance?

[AaronBrown]

It's simple to answer if by "tight" you just mean folding a lot of hands at the start. Each hand has roughly equal variance, if you play 10% of your hands you expose yourself to only one quarter the variance of someone who plays 40% of his hands, all other things being equal.

However, tight also might mean betting smaller on your good hands, and folding more often on moderate ones. That's going to further reduce your variance. The other players are likely to fold on the rare occassions you do bet, keeping variance down even farther.

However, it's certainly true that playing too tight increases your chances of losing money. It's bad to fold too many hands, because you won't get any action when you do play, and the blinds will eat up your stack. But it's not high variance. As MCS said, if you fold every hand, you have zero variance.