Variance in heads-up sit and go's

[oneill1970]

Hello all!

Here"s something that"s been bugging me.  If heads up SnGs supposedly reward skill and therefore minimise luck, how come everybody goes on about how high variance they are?  Shouldn"t more of a reliance on skill make the variance less, or am I just missing something really obvious?

I like playing them, as I"m bored with waiting for good hands in 10-player SnGs, and break about even.  I guess the moral is that 6-max is maybe my cup of tea...

Advice welcome, as always.

[AMRN]

I don"t play them - the rake kills it for me.  I have a record of around 60% win, but that just about breaks even. I do ok in 10 seat SnGs so prefer to concentrate my time there.

I did go through a period of playing 6 seat games to alleviate a spell of boredom, but after 500 games of $22 6seat SnGs, I broke even (actually made a profit of $1)..... abandoned that idea.

Neither short handed nor HU SnGs for me - I have an ROI of around 12% on 9 seat turbo SnGs, and can"t get anywhere near that playing anything HU or Short Handed.

[Swinebag]

yep, 60% ish for me too, so with the rake, not really worth it. a good laugh though and worth a change from the normal grind.

I know that some people do really well playing HU though. I do reckon they are math bot types who are pretty much impossible to win regularly from. However, their ROIs are never much above 15%. I have played a few 256 player HU tourneys on stars and sharkscoped a few of the players. A lot of the winning players had ROIs around 10% but because of the stakes they were playing, were making thousands!!

Definitely a murky field that I dont want to enter. I prefer my safe house of 9/10 man STTs with a good mixture of fish and sharks

[Jon MW]

You never win anything in poker by being good at it - you win it from being better than who you"re playing against.

So with HU, if you"re a lot better than your opponent then you should regularly beat them (because of the skill focus in HU).

But this is rarely going to happen, one person is likely to be a bit better than the other - therefore you cancel each other out, and the winner comes from who gets lucky when the HU tournament becomes a crapshoot. Hence the high variance.

[oneill1970]

Great replies - thanks!

I kinda view HU SnGs as ways of getting experience in HU play rather than making millions anyway, so as long as I don"t get disappointed when I just about break even, I guess it isn"t a problem.  I think I might just flit between 2/6/10 player SnGs, depending on how much time I have to sit down and play, and stick to the cash games for trying to eke out a profit!

Thanks again!

[RioRodent]

Great replies - thanks!

I kinda view HU SnGs as ways of getting experience in HU play rather than making millions anyway, ....

The problem here is that when you get HU in an MTT you don"t both have 75BBs, so HU SnGs don"t really reproduce the same situations... unless you can make it last 90 mins or so!  

[AMRN]

Great replies - thanks!

I kinda view HU SnGs as ways of getting experience in HU play rather than making millions anyway, ....

The problem here is that when you get HU in an MTT you don"t both have 75BBs, so HU SnGs don"t really reproduce the same situations... unless you can make it last 90 mins or so!  

hmmmmmm you didn"t watch the final table of the WSOPE then? 100BBs each and 5 hours later.........