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Interesting . Now this is a forum and consequently we are all are looking for poker players to comment to open new doors to your 'poker understanding' ... or sometimes even to kick down some locked doors . I am going to comment on your problem again from left field. Alas ... this feels like another long post, so apologies in advance.

In my experience, limited as it is, whenever I used to use the word "variance" in poker, I was applying the concept incorrectly.

You see, "variance" is a very, very broad mathematical concept that allows peaks and valleys of good and bad cards.

"Life" is also a very broad concept, full of the ups and downs over a long period of time. So when there is a problem, and someone shrugs their shoulders and says "that's life", it does not solve or address the root problem.

This is the point I am making here. I found that I was using the term "variance" to cover a multitude of errors (sins is a good word here) that really had nothing to do with variance.

I want to encourage you not to use the word "variance" for a while. I am quite convinced that the concept of "variance" falls under the category that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and poker players use it to gloss over a multitude of poker errors instead of digging deeper and solving some root causes.

So ... the fact remains that you are getting called a lot of times. One reason is the type of game or tournament you are playing. In the $1 rebuys (that I play for fun to demonstrate bankroll management to my friends) you can hardly expect people to lay down the BB when raised. The players are generally clueless and for every 100 of your raises, they are going to hit their cards ... well ... a little more than 15 of those times if you count when they fit the board with an OESD, etc.

• The type of tournament you play in affects the call rate out of the blinds. In a $1 rebuy, the blinds tend to call a lot. In a serious tournament ($100+) the skill pool is deeper and you get called for a number of reasons.

Qualify and play in a $322 entry fee tournament and the whole dynamic changes. If you get a reraise you *are* looking at the business end of a poker shotgun. Of course, at this level you also have good players using game theory to raise with sometimes nothing, but do you want to take the chance?

If you want to see EVERY HAND in a $322 entry fee tournament, to see BB behaviours, I did post EVERY HAND of a tournament I won last April (2007) in my personal Poker Blog. I am willing to post either the link or damn ... all seven parts to that tournament in a post. If I put all seven parts of that tournament on this site, I will either get bounced from the forum for flooding or win a glass of champagne for the longest post. (Note: ask GoodKarmaKid when I am back from vacation ). If you want the link I can give it to you but it is LONG, I mean ... holy smokes, I posted every hand with annotations and I usually reserve this Blog entry for people suffering from insomnia. It is the ultimate cure for insomnia! . I digress .... .

• Another non-variance reason for getting a lot of calls out of the BB is how loose you are.

The looser you are, the broader your playing range, and the more logical it is for the BB to call your raise.

Understand that most good poker players tabulate "calling frequency" & "raising frequency" for everyone at their table automatically. You should too .

They know how many times a cycle you are in a hand and how many times you raise. They also keep in mind what you raise with, but that is another subject.

The willingness of players to call your raise when in the BB is determined by your looseness and your aggression. For you to improve your understanding of this qualitative decision-making, you have to clearly understand the inherent difference between "aggression" and "looseness". Instead of telling you this in my own words, there is a recent, excellent article by Justin Bonomo that explains this difference. Here it is:

Loosness and Aggression are NOT the same thing by Justin Bonomo

So you see, there are a lot of of forces at work below the surface affecting the decision to call a raise from a particular player.

My game improved significantly when I stopped chanting the mantra of variance and started looking for real reasons ... then improving my poker to deal with those reasons. .

__________________
flintsword

"The lucky player is usually the player that knows how much to leave to chance."

Blog www.myspace.com/flintsword