I thought we might talk about hourly rate and standard deviation today. For those of you who are totally familiar with this, please come back next week. For those whose eyes are starting to glaze over, please bear with me.

Hourly rate is your win rate in dollars per hour. Unfortunately, this takes a long time to be accurate, typically thousands of hours. In our current instant-gratification world, everyone wants to think that know their hourly rate after a few hundred hours. that may seem like a lot, but poker is a very high variance activity, and you can be lucky or unlucky for a very long time.

Hourly rate is still the best measure we have, but remember to take it with considerable skepticism until you have the thousand of hours needed. Even then you need to be somewhat skeptical, as during the time elapsed, your game or that of your opponents may have changed.

Hourly rate needs to be tempered with standard deviation, which more-or-less measures varation (or luck, in our case). In another way of thinking, it measures predictability. Let’s pretend you are buying 100 baseballs. You get two containers, each certified to contain baseballs of the same average size. In one container, all of the balls are correct to within 1/8 of an inch. In the other, there are some around the right size, some very large ones and some very tiny ones. Box One would have a small standard deviation, and box Two a large one, even thought he average size was still the same. In box One, you be confident that the next ball you pull out would be a playable size, but in box Two you could not trust that.

That’s the way it works in poker (roughly). A low standard deviation makes your hourly rate more predictable and trustworthy, a large one means it will take even more time to trust it. Most poker standard deviations run between 9-10 big bets per hour. If yours is lower, it means your results are predictable, but it probably also means you are limiting your earn by not taking enough risks. If yours is higher, it may mean you are playing too many hands, or you are playing in a very volatile game.

If you don’t know you standard deviation, you can calculate it using formulas found in textbooks, or just use a results calculator (I use StatKing available from www.conjelco.com and I don’t paid to endorse this product). If you keep good records, you should be able to know it easily.

So what do you do with it? Your hourly rate, combined with your standard deviation, tells you how you are playing, what your bankroll needs are, and whether you are ready to move up (an hourly rate of better and 1.5 bets per hour typically means you will great success and a better earn at the next level. One of 0.5 bets per hour typically means you will not be successful there). That seems like a lot of useful information to me.

I don’t want to get into a war of dueling websites, but there was an item on another site that I was asked about. It really bothered me, so I thought I would write about it here. The author wrote a quiz question asking about blind play. You hold J3o and a late position player posts a big blind. Everyone folds to the poster, who raises, everyone else folds to you. What should you do with your J3?

The writer suggested that if he were in the poster’s position, he would raise with any two cards (just like it says to do in Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players). Therefore, he concluded he should call in the big blind with his J3. A student asked mw if this was good advice.

In short, NO! There are a lot of issues regarding blind play, and in fact one could write a good-sized book on the subject. So I limited myself to just a few quick points.

The first rule of blind defense is the better the player making the steal (both relative to you and relative to the universe), the fewer hands you should play. The second rule takes into account is how well you play out of position, particularly when you have nothing. If you plan to simply going to give up when you miss the flop, and check and call when you make a pair, you are much better off folding.

Many players, even though they have read HPFAP and have read that they should raise with any two when posting and checked to, simply cannot bring themselves to do it. Against those players - whom you must be able to identify by guess on sight if you are planning to call with J3- you will be making a huge error by calling. And many others have not even read the book, and only raise with big hands after posting. So even you are the better player, you will be making an error by calling.

All in all, there is very little to be gained by playing trash hands out of position even against likely steal raises unless you play very well, your opponent does not, and you are able to take many pots away from him with little or nothing.

A quick note on value betting on the river today. At limit hold’em and limit poker in general, I am a major advocate of river value betting. Most of the reasons are outlined in my article “Ten Common and Costly Limit Hold’em Errors, Part 4” available on CardPlayer .com (just click on the logo in the left margin). I love value betting. On the other hand, value betting at No Limit Hold’em, and NL poker in general, is a very high risk proposition.

By definition, value betting means betting a hand you think might be best, but is far from the nuts. In limit, the worst thing that can happen is you get raised, call, and lose two extra bets. In NL, a value bet by you can be followed by a huge raise, causing you to fold. Even if this happens rarely, it can make you a loser overall. Assume you have deep stacks, and you have pretty good hand. The pot is $500, and you think you can get your opponent to make a crying call of $100 most of the time. Well, if you are successful 80% of the time, but the other 20% you face a big raise and have to fold a hand you might have won had you checked, you are a net loser. (Note that in limit, you would be a winner under this scenario because you could simply pay off the bet. Even if you always lose when you call, winning the extra bet 80% of the time makes you a winner).

Of course, if your reading skills are such that you will always lay down your hand when it is a loser but call the big bet when the other guy is bluffing, you can value bet all you want. But if you feel when you value bet the river that you can’t call a big raise, you probably would be better off forgoing the extra “profit”.