It is well understood that a paired comparison (paired t test) provides better precision than a group comparison (two-sample t test), when the pairing is effective (the variation within a pair is small). However, when the variation among the pairs is sufficiently small, the group comparison is likely to yield a better result. To get a statistical explanation of this, we examine the two methods through an analogy to one-way and two-way analysis of variance. We introduce a new measure, R statistic, which is the ratio of their confidence interval lengths, as a quantitative criterion for comparing the two methods. The distribution of the Rf statistic is described by t and F distribution functions. Through this characterization, we show that the paired comparison can be better than group comparison when the variation among the pairs is statistically significantly large.