Grinding Poker For A Living

If you had to grind live poker for a living, where's the best place to do it? Taking into account cost of living, quality of life, convenience, pleasantness of casino, etc. And If you are earning enough grinding poker to travel anywhere in the world you are better of living elsewhere. In today's episode of the Nightly Grind Poker VLOG, I do a short 20 minute live play session on Ignition Casino poker, four tabling 5nl regular 6-max games o. It should be noted that 'Grinder' is also used to refer to players who play poker for a living. Similarly, these players will play very often until they reach their set goal. For the sake of this article, we're going to discuss grinding the table to win small pots.

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. Real Grinders: How to Play Poker for a Living: Poker Books for Smart Players, Book 1 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged Ashton Cartwright (Author, Publisher), Joshua Risser (Narrator) 2.7 out of.

Step 1: Preparing Financially to Make the Switch

Before you switch over to playing online poker professionally, you have to get your financial situation under control. Essentially, you're going to need three things to happen:

• You will need to win at a rate of twice what you need to be financially stable for at least six months.
• Your bankroll will need to be at least 150 buy-ins for cash games, at least 500 buy-ins for tournaments and no less than 2,000 bets for fixed-limit games.
• Separate from your bankroll, you will need six months worth of expenses including bills, food, gas and spending money in the bank.

Keep in mind that these are bare minimums, and anything less than this will compromise your ability to make it as a professional player.

Step 2: Compensating for the Hidden Components of a Professional Player's Living

Just because you learn to play poker to a point that allows you to make a good hourly doesn't mean that you can make it as a professional. There are a lot of key differences between playing for fun and playing as a pro, and we want to show you some of those differences before you decide to make the jump because you'll need to be prepared for them.

Difference #1: Increased Levels of Stress

When you play for fun, you can quit whenever you get stressed out over bad beats or a losing streak. If you play professionally, then you don't have this option because you have to get in a certain number of hours each week to make your budget work.

To deal with this increased level of stress, a lot of practice has to go into things to regulate your mental health. This can include an improved diet, sufficient sleep, meditation and a whole host of other things that you don't normally think about as being a critical part of being a professional poker player.

Difference #2: Hiring an Accountant

The tax laws in your part of the world are going to be something that you'll be responsible for since you'll be self-employed. Being self-employed as a poker player makes that even more complicated, so you're going to want to hire an accountant.

This might sound expensive, but there are certain expenses that come along with running your own business, and this is one of them. It will only cost $100 to $200 in most parts of the world, and it's well worth not having to deal with the headache of doing your own taxes.

Difference #3: Being Your Own Boss

It sounds great to be your own boss because of the freedom that it gives you. However, that also means that you have to be your own motivation to get out of bed, to stick to a schedule and to do what you need to do to experience success.

It's really easy to be motivated to play when you're only putting in 10 or 15 hours each week playing for fun. It's not easy to be motivated when you're on a two-week losing streak and you need to get in your six hours of play for the day.

Step 3: Technical Considerations

If you're playing professionally on the Internet these days, then there are a number of technical considerations that you will need to have sorted out. The following are things you will need to have ready if you want to have a competitive setup on your computer.

A. Database Software Backups

Your hand databases are an extremely important part of online play because they give you the statistics you need to evaluate your own play and that of your opponents. If your computer goes down, then you want to be able to get those databases back up and running as quickly as possible. Along these lines, having automated or manual backups for your database software is critical as a professional.

B. Computer and Account Security

Ideally, you should use your poker computer for nothing else besides playing and studying the game. This is a major safety and security issue because you don't want there to be any chance of a virus or keylogger making its way to your computer.

There have been more than one major scandal in the online poker world involving players who have had trojans installed on their computers by someone for the sole purpose of viewing their hole cards during play.

It goes without saying that you should have a special email address that you only use for poker, and you should change your passwords regularly. If the site you play with offers additional security options like a pin combination or a security token by RSA, then you should use those as well.

C. Additional Software

If you prefer software to help with table selection or to make it easier to multi-table, then you need to have that all configured ahead of time before you jump into a session. You want as little stress as possible when you open up the tables to play, so make sure that this software is updated and working correctly in your free time. These programs can add to your bottom line in a major way, but they can also turn into a real headache if you don't maintain them properly.

Poker pros such as Kevin Thurman featured above play 24 tables and use HUD software such as Holdem Manager and PokerTracker to keep track of opponent tendencies. Game selection tools like TableScan Turbo also help.

Step 4: Sitting Down to Play

Managing your sessions as a professional is a lot different than managing them when poker is a hobby. If someone asks, 'How do you make money playing online poker as a professional,' then the majority of your answer is going to come down to how you manage your sessions.

It's Called Grinding for a Reason

In the classic poker film 'Rounders', the true hero of the story is considered to be Knish. Even though he wasn't a main character, the whole point was that he knew that he played poker as his job, and it was his job to provide for himself and his family through that profession. He was not distracted by any of the following:

• The desire to be famous through his play
• Wanting to brag to everyone about being a pro poker player
• Getting in arguments with people over who is better at poker
• Letting anyone know how much money he had or how much money he made
• Using poker as an opportunity to stroke his ego

Instead, Knish treated poker like any other job, and he worked to maximize his earnings instead of playing the game for other reasons. When you play for a living, you have to focus exclusively on making money, and this means you have to ignore all of your desires for any kind of fame or glory while you push through sessions that can last for hours.

Mental Toughness

Along these lines, you have to be mentally tough because the swings of poker are really magnified when you know that you're playing for your livelihood. You can lower your stress level by having your financial situation under control as mentioned in step one, but there are also other things you can do to build your mental reserves. Consider the following chart of activities taken from real poker professionals:

You have to be able to come to each hand that you play without being affected by the results of the hands that have happened leading up to that moment. Mental training of this variety will directly impact your ability to maintain your win-rate over the long run. These four activities are some of the most common things that successful professionals do to keep themselves in line in this area of their lives.

Step 5: A Day in the Life of a Successful Professional Poker Player

Now that we've given you some warnings and some tricks about what to look out for if you're considering going pro, let's get into an example of an exact schedule of what a professional player might have lined up for a given day.

Important Schedule Points

Let's look at some important points here. First, you'll notice that a poker player's day starts later than a lot of other professions, and it tends to follow what would be considered a second shift schedule. The reason for this is that you want to be playing when the highest percentage of non-professionals are also playing to boost your win-rate. Along these lines, you want to be playing in the late afternoons and evenings.

Second, you'll notice that your play is going to be broken up into sessions that are about two hours each. Taking frequent breaks like this will help to improve your win-rate when compared to trying to just play straight through for six hours straight.

Is yonkers raceway casino open. Giving your mind a chance to rest and getting up from the computer for a little while will improve your results.

Along these lines, you also have normal breaks for eating. Because you will be waking up later in the day, you will also have a chunk of free time around midnight and early morning to unwind from your work day.

Step 6: Expanding and Improving

Once you are financially established and have yourself on a regular schedule, then you have to continue to improve as a player. The games are constantly getting tougher, and you have to get better if you want to even maintain the same win-rate over time. The key idea here is to always be pushing forward so that you don't get left behind, and there are a few different ways that you can do this:

• Learning a new form of poker gives you options to play in games that are typically going to be easier than no-limit hold'em.
• Extensive study with proven coaches who are better than you can help to elevate your win-rate at your current game.
• Coaching your own students who are at lower stakes can help you to get better at the basics and improve how you think about poker since you're forced to explain it.

To survive and thrive, you have to get better and learn more about poker. While that's what attracts a lot of people to the game, it can become tiresome when you're forced to do it to provide for yourself and the people who depend on you.

Step 7: The Endgame

Eventually, you're going to want to do something else other than play poker for a living. For most people, poker is a means to an end, and you need to decide what that end is for you on a personal level.

Poker is not the endgame. It's a tool to help you get to your own endgame.

Some people just want to make enough money that they'll never have to work again. That's a fine goal. Other people want to use the money and skills they learn in poker to transition over to something else. That's also fine. What's not fine is to put yourself in a situation where you have no goals beyond playing poker.

The Importance of Long-Term Goals

The reason that this is such an important topic for poker players in particular is that playing the game as a professional is exceptionally stressful, and there are a number of cases where people have ended up with serious mental problems that were exacerbated by the pressure of playing poker for a living.

You're going to need long-term motivation if you want to be able to maintain a successful level of play, and the best form of motivation is meeting your own personal, long-term goals.

Long-term goals aren't typically going to be optional for professional players in this game because they are necessary for maintaining the level of performance that is required to be successful. Moreover, if poker doesn't work out for you, then you want to be able to transition into something else without simply feeling stuck.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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