The Daily Grind

Grinding: making a living playing a lot of online poker, often at low to moderate stakes. You have to admire the irony inherent in its use in the poker world. The “daily grind” has always been used to describe a job. In fact, usually one that you go to five days a week, where you are expected to show up at a certain time and not leave until the work day is done. Exactly the thing that so many professional poker players are avoiding (claim to be avoiding, hope to be avoiding).

And yet there are many of poker players who, without apparent embarrassment, describe themselves as “grinders”. I wonder who, on what online poker forum, first dared to associate the term “grinding” with playing poker. I mean, according to the TV shows, being a poker professional is supposed to be about the most glamorous career in the world, if you’re not an A-list actor or a pop music legend.

But I imagine that there are thousands of serious poker players who have suddenly thought during the middle of a (presumably losing) session, “ZOMG – this is like doing work. It’s… it’s… it’s like having a job.” And this feeling is only reinforced by multi-table online sessions in which one is zipping around among virtual felts like an assembly line robot. It’s almost as if your decisions are being made by finger muscle memory, like a pianist playing a long-memorized concerto.

Now, I don’t think I’ll ever be a grinder. It is too much like a real job, and to make any kind of reasonable money at the lower stakes, you have to play far more tables simultaneously than I’m capable of doing. But I thought it would be interesting to put in a few 6-8 hour days of low stakes online cash games, just to get a feel for what it’s like.

After doing it, the first thing I have to say: if you’re a successful online poker grinder, I doff my hat to you; it’s hard. And it’s definitely not glamorous either; I can certainly see why they call it “grinding”. Here are a few random observations taken from my three-day grinding experiment:

It’s difficult, but crucial, to stay focused on the task at hand. I had to put my instant message clients on “away” status, shut down my Firefox browser, turn off the mobile phone, etc. I know that some people play eight tables, carry on three IM conversations, and read their friends’ blogs, all at once. Not me, and I suspect the very most successful grinders are totally mono-focused on their games. At the very least, if you’re capable of paying attention to something beyond the tables you’re playing, you might as well be at more tables and making more EV. And an aside to the FAA: please be sure that your air traffic controllers don’t have access to Facebook.
I found the exercise astonishingly good for my playing discipline. Specifically, I found it much easier not to get involved in marginal situations when I knew I had another 1000 hands coming to me that day. Also, I didn’t want to take away my concentration too much from tables #1 and #3 while I was trying to navigate particularly choppy waters on table #2. I note, by the way, that one very successful grinder I know says the following about marginal situations like that: “Get all-in or at least pot-committed. Usually you just win the pot, but if you don’t, at least you don’t have a tough decision any more.”
It’s astonishingly important to put bad beats (and big wins) behind you quickly. A beat costing or gaining you a couple of buy-ins is as ephemeral as the splash of a rock into a stream; your attention is needed elsewhere, right now. I first learned this lesson a couple of years ago watching Annette Obrestad play an indeterminate (to me) number of tournaments on her laptop while sitting in the lobby of the Atlantis Resort. If she was involved in an all-in coup, she immediately focused on another table, not even waiting to see the outcome of the all-in. Of course, this is 100% correct – the software will figure out who won, and either deal you another hand, or not. Her response to busting out of a tournament was to simply pop up a client lobby and find another tournament to enter. I never reached the Annette_15 level of instant context switching, but that was my goal, and I even managed to look away from a few all-in situations. It felt good and disciplined, and sure enough, when I looked back, either I had a bunch more chips or the software had rebought for me.

Those were the lessons of my brief foray into the world of grinding. As I said, it’s not something I’d make a regular habit, much less a career. But I actually enjoyed it, and I might make it an occasional break from my normal reality. Of course, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea: at one point, my wife walked in my office and asked what I was doing. “Grinding.” “Looks like you’re playing poker.” “Pretend this was your job – that you did it for eight hours a day to make your living.” There was a brief pause. “I’d rather dig ditches eight hours a day.”

If you prefer your jobs indoors, then maybe grinding is for you. If so, then I wish you great success.

Lee Jones is has worked in the poker industry for six years, and been associated with professional poker for almost 20 years. He is the author of Winning Low Limit Hold’em, which has been in print for over 14 years.

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Casino poker language:

BUNNY - An eight. So named because one can easily draw "rabbit ears" above the numeral 8, "paws" in the middle and "feet" at the bottom. (Do this only at home, and not on cards that will be used for play.)
POT LIMIT - A game where the maximum bet is determined by the size of the pot at the time. Note that a player wanting to raise first calls the bet, then totals the pot to determine the maximum amount he can raise.
QUALIFIER - A minimum standard that a hand must meet in order to win. Usually applied to the lowball side of a high-low split pot.
ANTE - A small bet all players are required to make before a hand is dealt. Not all games have an ante. Related terms: BLIND, FORCED BET.
OPEN - Make the first bet in a hand, especially in draw poker.
SHARK - A good/crafty player often posing as a fish early in the game.

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