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Texas Hold'em No Limit Advanced

Effective Grinding

11,077 Views on 25/2/17

In this article, we'll lay out a simple plan that will help you avoid the negative effects associated with playing poker for very long hours and allow you to make your daily grind as painless and efficient as possible.

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Playing poker for a living might seem like a romantic idea on the surface, but every grinder worth his or her salt will tell you that it's, in fact, a grind. Poker is a "hard way to make easy living" and the day to day life of a professional is far less glamorous than one might think. "The grind" is, after all, a phrase associated more often with a standard nine to five affair than with using one's intellect to earn money playing poker at a virtual table.

Like with everything else in life you have to put in a lot of hours in order to reap the rewards and the hours starts to feel very, very long if you're doing something consistently for a long time. In this article, we'll lay out a simple plan that will help you avoid the negative effects associated with playing poker for very long hours and allow you to make your daily grind as painless and efficient as possible.


Eyes on the Prize

“If you have a goal, write it down. If you do not write it down, you do not have a goal - you have a wish.” - Steve Maraboli

The first step in ensuring that you won't get stuck in a rut of the daily grind is to make sure that your goals are as well defined and as visible as possible. Setting goals that are worth having is an art in and of itself, but the most important thing that you should keep in mind is that they should be tangible. Write them down, preferably on a piece of paper and have that piece of paper in your vicinity at all times. Whether it's a notebook that you keep on your desk or a note folded in your pocket make sure that you're constantly reminded about where you're headed.

If you prefer to rely on technology and you like to record your goals using software like Evernote or Trello, you might want to take additional steps to make yourself accountable. Share your goals with your poker friends, set-up a blog or journey thread on your favorite poker forum, find a group of like-minded players and create a study group that's working towards similar achievements, keep yourself accountable and give others mandate to keep you accountable.

When you're grinding the seventh hour of your MTT session, the knowledge that there's "light at the end of the tunnel" can spell the difference between making a deep run and busting on the bubble playing your C-game so make sure that light shines as bright as possible.



Stay Focused

There's a bunch of studies out there suggesting that our ability to focus is far more limited than we might think. The more pessimistic ones claim that the advent of smartphones caused the average attention span of a human being to become shorter than that of a... goldfish (8 vs 9 seconds). Even if you take more realistic estimates into account twenty minutes of sustained attention is the most an average human being can hope for.

The expectation that you'll just sit down behind your desk and grind for eight hours, seven days a week is at best somewhat unrealistic and at worst straight up unhealthy. Since playing poker at a high level is considerably more sophisticated than pushing pencils or being a cog in a production line you should really care about your mental performance and the first step to optimizing it is to accept your limitation.


I'm not saying playing poker for six or eight plus hours a day can't be done, it certainly can and some genetic outliers can do it without taking a one minute break, but most of us mere mortals will have to take some steps to ensure that we play as close to our A-game for as long as possible.

Fortunately, there's a number of things we can do in order to maintain our focus. Taking breaks is the simplest and the most essential tool in your arsenal. If you're not taking a five-minute break at least every hour you're most likely doing it wrong. If you can take a minute or two every 20-30 minutes - that's even better. What you do during a break is also important, walking around the room, doing five push-ups, taking a look out the window, or a few mindful breaths will all be far superior and better for you than scrolling through Facebook.

If you can't take many breaks consider listening to some soft instrumental ambient music while playing. Studies show that this might actually slightly impede your performance at the tables (though with a proper choice of music the effect will be negligible or even slightly positive depending on the individual), but it can also increase the amount of time you can stay focused for. Lastly, consider streaming your session via Twitch.tv.

Even if you don't care about becoming 'internet famous' interaction with the viewers and the act of voicing your thought processes can work wonders when it comes to your attention levels.



Introduce Novelty

Changing your environment can be instrumental in boosting your motivation and helping you maintain focus. As a poker player, you can either introduce novelty via your game selection or through modifying your workspace. If you're a holdem grinder, consider learning some PLO or MTT on the side. Maybe you're tired of the poker room that you've played hundreds of thousands of hands on?

Consider changing it - preferably for a one with better VIP deal or softer tables. Find some new graphic skin for the tables you're playing on or redesign your HUD. As for changing the workspace, if you're on a budget you can do a bunch of simple, inexpensive things like buying a plant or a LED strip for a few quid to add some ambient lighting to your setup. If you're a midstakes baller, buy an additional monitor, some gaming peripherals or a beast PC.

You shouldn't rely on material possessions for motivation and you shouldn't expect that a LED strip will bump your win rate, but you'd be surprised how big of an effect a few small changes in your environment can have on your daily grind.



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Matt VIP

Matt is predominantly a mental game and planning expert, with a terrific knowledge of science, meditation, practical methods of improvement and of course, a good level of poker skill! Look out for his strategy articles and follow him for hi ... Read More

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