There is nothing wrong with infinite variance distributions, _per se_... For instance, simulating a Cauchy using `rcauchy(10^3)` produces a sample truly from a Cauchy distribution! Hence MCMC has no specific feature to "fight" for or against infinite variance distributions. The difficulty with infinite variance distributions is at the Monte Carlo level, for instance if you want to compute $$ \mathfrak{I} = \int_0^\infty \sqrt{x} \dfrac{1}{\pi}\dfrac{1}{1+x^2} \,\text{d}x $$ the integral exists (and is finite), but using $$ \dfrac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \sqrt{|x_i|} $$ when the $x_i$'s are Cauchy leads to an infinite variance estimate. See, e.g., > expl=matrix(abs(rcauchy(10^6)),ncol=1000) > est=apply(expl,2,mean) > quantile(est,c(.9,.99,.999)) 90% 99% 99.9% 12.96875 74.78751 321.73881 which shows that the estimator can get very large! And away from the true value > integrate(function(x){sqrt(x)*dcauchy(x)},low=0,up=Inf) 0.7071078 with absolute error < 2e-05 In this case, you need to use importance sampling.