  We measure the variance in the distribution of off-plane (|b|>20 deg.)
galaxies with m_K<13.5 from the 2MASS K-band survey in circles of diameter
between 0.344 deg. and 57.2 deg. The use of a near-infrared survey makes
negligible the contribution of Galactic extinction to these fluctuations. We
calculate these variances within the standard Lambda-CDM model assuming that
the sources are distributed like halos of the corresponding mass, and it
reproduces qualitatively the galaxy counts variance. Therefore, we test that
the counts can be basically explained in terms only of the large scale
structure. A second result of this paper is a new method to determine the two
point correlation function obtained by forcing agreement between model and
data. This method does not need the knowledge of the two-point angular
correlation function, allows an estimation of the errors (which are low with
this method), and can be used even with incomplete surveys.
  Using this method we get xi(z=0, r<10 h^{-1}Mpc)=(29.8+/-0.3)
(r/h^{-1}Mpc)^{-1.79+/-0.02}, which is the first measure of the amplitude of xi
in the local Universe for the K-band. It is more or less in agreement with
those obtained through red optical filters selected samples, but it is larger
than the amplitude obtained for blue optical filters selected samples.
