How should you react to variance?

[Burnley Joe]

My opinion is that often, you shouldn't. Let's say you do well in 3 out of 10 tournaments. Some games you play are perfect, some you know you made the wrong move at the wrong time in that specific game. Then in the next 10, you don’t cash at all even though you felt like you played well. So what do you do? Well you react, of course, but how you react could be the problem. Something must be done, or should it? The ups and downs of bad luck, or good luck, dont always tell you the underlying quality of how you actually played your own game. But very few players are confident enough to stand by their judgements about the underlying quality of their play and so remain glued instead to short-term indicators - indicators purely by chance. Some players ignore the fact that there are ordinary ups and downs and instead look for some deep meaning in short-term change. If anything goes wrong I think they look for a special cause and tackle the problem by changing their play too much. I also think that the consequence then is that the total variation becomes greater than it would if they just played their own game and allowed their game to run uncontrolled. In other words, you make the variability of your game worse by trying to fix it. But is it really that difficult? Things go up and down. How hard can the facts be? I am not going to say all ups and downs are random. But I do think that reading too much into the information can be as damaging as ignoring it. Adjusting your game too much might can just lead to worse problems. Of course, ups and downs can have real and important causes. But even these don't necessarily tell you about the underlying quality of your game. The risk of playing down change is that you might miss the next big win. But since there's an equal risk of over-reaction, does anyone know of a solution? I would like to know it please. Anyway thats my thoughts on recent downswings and upswings, and i aint tweakin my game. BJ

[PGremlin]

Re: How should you react to variance? You know as well as me that MTT's can be very sick in variance. Losing a dozen MTT games in a row is nothing special, expecially in the huge field MTT's. But to know if it's just variance or you got outplayed can be a difficult judgement call. 1) If you are confident that you played strong then don't worry to much. 2) If you are still a bit worried then get someone who you trust and is qualified enough to judge your game to review a few complete games where you think you played good and still lost. Getting another persons point of view can really help improve your game. 3) Use a tracker and review your own games and see if you really didn't make mistakes / left opportunities unused.