It's All About Volume

I'm not a high-volume online player. I never have been, and I find it unlikely that I ever will be. But I do go through phases were I play online a little bit more than normal like I'm doing the past few weeks. Since I've never kept much more than $1,000 online, my poison of choice has been low-limit 135-player Rush SNGs ($4.40 and $12).

Playing these tournaments has given me a new appreciation for the insane volume players have to put in if they hope to overcome short-term variance. As someone who's made his living around tournament poker for the past several years, I wasn't oblivious to short-term variance. But witnessing it in the aggregate is very different than living through it yourself.

Multi-tabling takes on much more importance as a tournament player. In the past, some of the highest-volume tournament players played 10,000 online tournaments per year. That's the only way to try to smooth out short-term variance, and it requires the ability to play 15 or more tables at once.

The rest of us -- the recreational players, the ones who aren't willing to commit that amount of time to online poker or to develop the ability to play that many tables at once -- really are just treating tournament poker as a lottery ticket. Is there a skill component? Of course. Is it greater than short-term variance? Ask anybody who's ever lost a flip on a final table.