Ultimate hold em variance

1357111317

Well-Known Member
#1
I am kind of curious as to the variance in this game compared to BJ for example. Since the basic stratagy house edge is pretty high (3.5%ish) you would think its low but since you can win and lose up to 6x your intial bet on a hand ( not inculding the full house and higher blind bonuses) i would think the variance would be pretty high. Am i correct in my thinking?
 

NightStalker

Well-Known Member
#2
with perfect Bs, it's high variance

But one can sacrifice EV to reduce the variance. Like not raising preflop with mediocre hand. Variance is higher than bj, but game speed it low..
 

WRX

Well-Known Member
#6
I agree with Nynefingers. The standard deviation is calculated easily enough from the data on the Wizard's site on the distribution of payoffs. The variance for one hand and a one-unit wager is 24.28469, and the standard deviation is 4.92795. This assumes one-unit wagers on the ante AND on the blind (with the rules requiring equal bets on those two spots). The problem can be defined differently, by specifying a half-unit wager on each spot, and obviously the answer will be different in that case. This also assumes perfect basic strategy, which is not reasonably achievable by human players. The expectation from perfect basic strategy is -2.19%. The expectation from a simplified basic strategy will be in the neighborhood of -2.35%, and the standard deviation will differ slightly from the figure given above, but I don't know in what direction.
 
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