Hi all, this is sort of rambling so I apologize in advance.
I recently started playing here (within the last three months), and I'm having a blast in general. Thanks to all who help to run the site!
I've noticed a lot of threads recently about dice sucking and bad beats, and I wanted to share some insight based on some experiences I have had in another arena.
I used to be a semi-pro online poker player. I was making about $10-$15k a year which would supplement my income I was making from my "real" job. I stopped doing it a couple of years ago for a number of reasons, but the two major ones were that the US government made online gaming illegal (to a certain extent), and that poker was literally putting me on life-tilt because of the massive variance.
It's not that I couldn't "handle" most situations. Clearly, I was making money. It's that the swings were so massive, and so incalculably massive, that literally any scenario that could happen would, and the variance in and of itself, when you are dealing with thousands of dollars of real money, is a little difficult to divorce yourself from. For a person who is passionate and competitive, this can really affect your emotional being from day to day. This is an important point and it applies to conquer club.
The simplest poker scenario I can apply this to are single table tournaments. STTs are nine-person, one-table shootouts in which (usually) the winner of the tournament takes 50% of the total amount bought in for, second place takes 30% and third place takes 20%. Over thousands of instances, it seems like it would be relatively easy to chart progress and generate an expected monetary value. Most STT players play in the neighborhood of 50 tourneys a day, and very many have about 30k-50k tournaments charted on an excel spreadsheet.
You'd think that they would've seen every possible massive swing. However, most have not. 40-50 tournament dry spells are not uncommon. Instances in which every possible unfathomable bad beat that could occur, does occur. There's even a poker forum dedicated specifically to what's known as BBV, bad beats/variance. The stories there are literally unbelievable.
Why am I posting this? Because simply put, with the number of variables that there are at conquer club, and with the number of die rolls in a single turn, let alone a single game, there really is no limit to how brutal the variance can be. I won't take the time to bore you with the mathematics of the situation, but I will tell you that poker probably has far LESS variance because there are such finite sets of variables. The game is almost always the same, or very similar. Once the chips are in the center and the cards are face up, there really is only a couple of ways things can play out. However, there are so many more discrete opportunities for chance with hundreds of die rolls per game, honestly even thinking about attempting to calculate it makes my head REALLY hurt. That's not even getting into controlling for number of players, sequential vs. freestyle, flat-rate vs. escalating, adjacent vs. unlimited, etc. Ow.
However, what I can tell you is that expect anything. Expect to lose 80 million games in a row, and please don't take it so seriously. For a couple of months (and I realize it's different when there is money on the line), how I did at the poker table on a given day would affect my attitude about almost everything else in life, at least to a certain extent. It's part of the reason why I stopped playing poker.
The most important thing with CC is to have fun and to realize that ultimately you only control so much. In poker, they often preach that as long as you don't make any strategic errors, you should never be upset about getting unlucky. In the end, the luck eventually evens out. Really, it does. I don't care how many 17:4s you lost this week. You will not remember the times you won and got lucky, but you will remember the times you lost. It's human nature. Keep playing strategically sound and don't go on tilt. You know when you just keep clicking attack because you can't believe you're going to lose all your armies? Stop doing that. That's tilt.
This post is probably somewhat pointless (and maybe in the wrong forum), but if anyone wants me to post the actual math about the variance (or can provide links where others have discussed it), I certainly can try to come up with some stats.
