Someone asked me the other day how much control you can have in a game of poker? Well firstly you simply cannot control losing money…..this is an absolute given that you will lose money. However there are things that you can control and the first one is in how you conduct yourself mentally and how you react to losing money. If you react badly then your results will suffer but this is something that you can control. You can also control the size of the pot in many cases using pot control techniques.
Another aspect of the game that you can control is the level of variance. A low variance style will mean that the dips to your bankroll will be less than if you were playing a higher variance style. In the world of financial trading then these dips are called drawdowns! Many financial traders view having low drawdowns very high up on their list of priorities and I can understand why that is. I have known many poker careers cut short by highly negative variance.
So you can control losses but only to the extent of those losses. You simply cannot control losing money because that is as inevitable at some stage as the fact that you will be a day older tomorrow than what you are today or that the sun will rise. I believe that controlling your losses is as important as making money and some of the best technical players in the world have tried to optimise their earn rate by increasing variance only to then get blown out of the water so to speak.
