The incredible power of variance in poker

Just found this neat little tool linked somewhere else so I thought I'd make a post about variance in poker and how scared of it you all should be.

http://www.pokervariancesimulator.fr/

I put in my stats so far this year and this was the result



Basically what that means is someone with the exact same real winrate as me over my hand sample of 385,000 hands could be up as much as $120,000 or as little as $20,000.

Over 1.5million hands with my current win rate and standard deviation , easily 3 years full time poker the graph looks like this



It's converged somewhat but there is still about $250,000 between the top guy and the bottom guy. Remember these are 50 hypothetical people with exactly the same stats some ran good some ran bad. So the next time you read a dickwaving brag thread just remember exactly how much variance there is in poker these graphs show it's easily possible to go on prolonged heaters when you're actually not all that good of a player. Something to think about anyway...

Here's an interesting one these are the graphs of 50 2big blind/100 losers at 2/4NL over 300,000 hands.



notice a few of them are breakeven/up slightly and one is up nearly $20,000

edit either I'm dumb at posting images or this forum is dumb at having images posted on it but here is the direct link

http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/7044/varilose.jpg

where did u find these stats?
sharkscope?

mayeb those payers who continually claim they are good and just run bad having played the game only 2 years aer sometimes right...........

im happy i have another 18months of running good left.......

amazing graph. thanks for posting!