The Decisions-vs-outcomes lesson showed the seed of variance: even a bet as strong as poker ever offers is behind after twenty tries 5.8% of the time. Poker edges are much thinner than that toy bet, and the swings compound street over street, session over session. The practical consequence: your win rate — the thing you control — is a small, steady number per hundred hands, while your results arrive in lumps of ± dozens of buy-ins. The lumps are variance, and they are not a signal about your play.

• Downswings are normal arithmetic, not diagnosis. A modest winning player still endures losing stretches of twenty-plus buy-ins regularly across a career. The right first response to a downswing is a review process check (the researcher-workflow lesson's loop), not a strategy overhaul.
• A bankroll exists to keep you solvent while the edge compounds. If you play stakes where one bad stretch forces you out of action, your edge never gets the sample size it needs to express itself. Commonly published guidance puts cash-game requirements around 20–40 buy-ins for the stake, and substantially more for tournaments, where payout jumps and field sizes inflate the swings — treat those figures as widely cited conventions from the community, not this app's output.
• Move DOWN faster than you move up. Taking a shot up with a thin cushion risks the roll; moving down after losses costs only pride and buys back survival.
• Track decisions, not just results. Across small samples the scoreboard lies; across large ones it converges. Review volume, decision quality, and leak patterns — the Progress dashboard's drill history is exactly that kind of ledger for this app's spots.

Scope note, in keeping with this course's honesty model: this app ships no bankroll tracker, no real-money anything, and Play mode resets stacks like a cash game. What it can verify — chart accuracy under repetition — is precisely the part of your game that bankroll discipline exists to protect. Keep the money management on paper of your own; keep the decision quality here.