In a previous post, I criticized the loser’s mentality of counters. The belief that hardening oneself to pain is a necessary and advisable part of the AP career is counterproductive. Many counters spend ridiculous amounts of time and emotional energy trying to answer the question, “How unlucky was I?” Instead of calculating how many standard deviations “below EV” you were, why not spend your time and effort trying to raise your edge? This message was lost or not well received by the counters reading my blog.
Some took offense that I did not name names when criticizing, missing the point that I don’t care who the player is. It is the silly statements that I quoted that I consider indicative of a misguided approach to the game. Others asserted that my lack of empathy must indicate that I have personally never had a big loss. I’ve had five-figure losses on games with 50% edges, so don’t tell me about being “below EV.”
What’s funny is that shortly after that post, I saw some of the televised National Spelling Bee competition. One of the words in a latter round was “ishniae” (sp?). As these kids got knocked out, they gave exit interviews. One kid obviously had never heard the word that knocked him out, and his guess was incorrect. Did that kid come to the sideline and say, “I know 98% of all English words. There is only a 2% chance that I would get a word that I don’t know. So I was several standard deviations below EV with that word choice. It’s unlikely I would have that unlucky a draw next time, so I just need to get more spelling bees in. If I can live as long as Methuselah, I could get enough bees in to reach the long run.”
These fierce competitors said nothing of the kind! To a kid, they said, “I made big improvements this year, but I need to study my vocabulary more.” One kid said, “I need to work on my German.” Every one of them talked about how he intended to strengthen his game. They eagerly talked about their plans to get back in the lab and improve on their weak areas. None of them talked about bad luck, running bad, below-EV, or my new favorite, “negative variance.”
I consider myself part of the modern era of professional gambling, but see, back in the day, we didn’t call it “negative variance.” We called it “losing.” But I guess I’m old-school that way. The reason I don’t like the phrase “negative variance,” other than the fact that there is no such thing, is that it’s a transparent attempt by primarily weak counters to distinguish themselves from the degenerates that they despise. When gamblers complain about losing, counters think, “Well, you’re a loser, so what did you expect? Oh, but me, I’m different. I had an edge. You lost, but I had negative variance. See the difference?” Hmm, not really.
Quit trying to sugar-coat losses, and quit using variance as a scapegoat. Universally, players overestimate their edge. Now if a player estimates a 21% edge, but is in fact playing with a 15% edge, then he’s probably still in decent shape. But if a counter estimates a 1% edge, when in fact it’s not that high, they where does he stand?
Santi tried to make a point, saying that the higher the edge, the lower the variance. Of course he was subjected to the lawyereze before anyone thought a moment about the point he was trying to make. I think there are actually two points. First of all, as Santi clarified, given games of comparable payoffs, the variance does drop as the edge increases. For instance, consider a weighted coin that pays either +1 or -1 on every flip. As we increase the Heads probability, and you bet on heads, your edge is increasing, and your variance is decreasing. If we reach p=1, then your edge is 100%, and your variance is 0.
The other message that I got from Santi’s comment is that most players care about the probability of having a winning session. For heat and liquidity reasons, this is not an irrelevant criterion. As we increase our edge, the chance of having a winning session increases, and when the edge is quite high, then even a session that exhibits great “negative variance” is often still positive. So it is with many of the games we play. We have had sessions where we were WAY below our expected profit, so we ended up winning only a little bit, instead of winning a lot.
I rarely hear bitter complaints about such sessions, which further strengthens my belief that what bothers players is not the “negative variance” so much as the losing.
The prescription, as always, is to give up trying to find new euphemisms and marketing spin. Any player who continues to play a game with a weak edge will continue to experience frequent pain. A professional AP can learn a lot from those 13-year-old spellers—next time crush that ishniae!