I've never played for 8 hours straight so YMMV, but in general with big tasks at work, the key is to subdivide.

Eight hours of concentration is daunting. But what about one?

Well, just switch it up once an hour.

Hour one: Focus on preflop tendencies. Range every player in every hand. Evaluate yourself at every showdown.

Take an orbit off.

Hour two: Focus on turn raises. Predict when people will wait for the turn. Predict when they will fastplay.

Take an orbit off. Eat a snack.

Hour three: Focus on the other games in the room. Which are good? Which would you move to if your game broke right now?

Take an orbit off.

Hour four: Focus on that hot waitress. Oh, yeah. She'll take your order. Yeah, she loves the way you say "no mayo." Say it again.

Take an orbit off to eat.

Hour five: Focus on the card-throwing douche in Seat 1. What's his preflop range? What are you gonna 3-bet him with? What turns are you gonna bluff him on?

Miss the blinds, but post in the CO. Pull up a strat thread on 2p2.

Hour six: Focus on that strat thread. Who's wrong? Who's right? Work the ranges.

Take an orbit off. The hot waitress gets off her shift; go see if she'll get off on your shaft. Oh, yeah.

Hour seven: Focus on the reg you play most with. What are his / her strengths? Weaknesses?

Take an orbit off.

Hour eight: Focus on how good this game is. Do you want to stay an extra hour? Unzoo your stack. How'd you do?

@callipygian - Great advice! Makes sense to break up the monotony into 8 segments. And it never hurts to improve on messing with waitress skills.

Calli gave some good advice. Taking orbits off and letting your mind cool off is good advice. I once read a tidbit that somebody found that concentrating on something else entirely, i.e. what's on the bar TV or having a convo w/ somebody during the break is helpful.

Out of the list you picked 'attention starts to wander' and you're far from alone which is why I see Adderall and other drugs discussed. The 10 years worth of grinding has likely drained your capacity for intense concentration as well over a long session.

Here's what I do: I do not attempt to concentrate intensely on every single thing that goes on bec it's too difficult and as the years have gone by I don't really love the game as I used to. I also don't sit at the table and just play. I can be very chatty when allowed, meaning that if somebody else is willing to talk I converse. That keeps me from letting my mind simply drift off to something unrelated to the game. Try to ease it up a bit: Remain connected to the table but don't fry your synapses in the attempt to glean every bit of info over the course of a long session.

ETA: I forgot my most effective behavior: Every now and then go into the men's room and completely douse your head w/ cold water for a good while. That really works wonders.

@callipygian should write a book. Very good, measured posts ITT.

I play my worst when I know I only have a short window in which to play. I get involved in too many hands, and the result is very wide variance - either I lose 1-2 buyins or a go up 3-4 buyins. But the losses add up to more than the wins. I've stopped going if I don't have time for 4 or more hours of play, and its paying off.

As for focus, I've found that the answer is being sociable. When I'm being quiet, I start focussing inwards too much - just playing my own cards, fancy play sets in, or I lose focus and my mind starts wandering.

By being sociable at the table, I focus on other people, have a better time and am more attuned to other people's emotions, reactions and demeanour. My mind doesn't wander and while it might seem counterintuitive to some, I'm actually more focussed on the game.

I actually play very short sessions, so it's more like, play for 1.5 hours, take a 2-3 day break. But my first job was shelving books at the library, where I learned all about monotony.

And also hitting on all the hot nubile young women prowling the stacks. They'd be all like, "Where are the 700s?" and I'd be all, "Naw, girl, you the art."

:grunch:

Good lord.

2 hours in the car to play for 2 hours of play before you space out?
That's idiotic. You're not a grinder. A grinder will play for 6-8 hours easily.

I like that you're eating and well rested before a session. That's good.

Watching players and profiling them is important, then once you've got a handle on them you need to attack however you can. Sometimes that will take 3+ hours to get the right spot. Wait patiently and exploit whichever situations present themselves.

It's hard to maintain intense focus for long periods of time. So once you've gotten a handle on the table, relax a little bit. Chat with people, watch the TV a little bit, get a drink, stand up every 2 hours or so and go walk around and stretch a bit.



My routine depends on the day. On a friday I'll go to work, work for the day, afterwards I hop in the car and drive to the casino (35mins), get there about 8pm. On the way I call ahead, usually get seated right away. Play for about an hour while watching the table, and the surrounding tables (lots of regs in the room so table selection helps a lot). About an hour in I'll get up and go order dinner. Half hour later when it's ready I take another break to eat. I'll play from 8pm to about 2:45am. At that time tables are breaking and most of the drunks have left so the roads have cleared up. Staying any later hasn't been too profitable so I leave in time to get food on the way home.


In Vegas I'll get up at 10-11am, walk to the Wynn or the Venetian (won't be doing that again with Adelson's stance on online poker though), get coffee/muffin at the table. Play until 4-5pm, cash out and get food. Go to another casino and play from 6ish to 2-3am, grab food and go to bed. I'l basically play all day long every day for a week. Damn I miss vegas.


Overall, you can't worry about "protecting your winnings", you just need to play. Much of your time at the table will be waiting. Being able to sit patiently and wait for your chance to strike is super important for a live player. Sometimes you'll have lots of chances, other times you won't. I find the whole exercise very relaxing, so I can play all day without any issues.

A couple of thoughts about this notion that after a couple of hours of observing, you've figured out the players and there's nothing left to study.

First, that's about 50 hands at most live games. If you're 10 handed, then most likely most of the players have probably played maybe what, 10 hands max (not counting the "everybody limps and then folds when they missed the flop" as playing a hand). So then subtract the times the hand doesn't go to showdown, and I'd suggest that it's pretty unlikely that you really have much of a handle on how each player plays a variety of hands. In fact, you've probably only seen them play a handful.

Second, the key IMO is picking up on how the table changes over time. Mr. Tight as Hell can become Mr. Maniac after the first bad beat. Or maybe someone made an insulting comment to someone and now that guy is on tilt. Maybe a guy is up a good amount, and now changes his game and starts becoming risk averse so he doesn't lose his profit.

My point is that the table isnt a fixed thing, and once you've seen it, you're done. It actually changes dramatically over the course of time, and the way the players are playing now can be very different then the way they were playing an hour ago. So I'd suggest you may have just stopped observing when you should be paying as much attention 2 hours in as when you first sat down.

So I'm guessing as was suggested by another poster that you just don't find poker very exciting after about 2 hours, so you quit being interested, rather than you've figured out the table and have nothing left to observe.

@Drift,

I'm the opposite. I don't sit down if I don't think I can be patient and fold multiple hands if nothing good comes. I always ask if I'm comfortable enough to sit down and pay enough attention to watch and explain the movie Inception, and if the answer is no, I don't go.

The 60min drive is probably going to be cut in half tonight. I found another route, which although I'm less familiar with, has much less stop lights.

The thing is, low-limit poker should require less attention and effort than watching and explaining "Inception". It's called a grind specifically because it is fairly monotonous and not intensive. This is a flag — you are overthinking it.

I really think my initial read that you need to shift the focus to you and yourself was spot-on.

So update.

I played 6 hours today, most of the time was spent being ~$100 down. Pocket pairs came less often, and sets were even more rare. Pot odds were against draws, so I avoided them, yet when I had two pair and did pot bets, someone stayed until the river for a flush. That hurt.

What am I thinking? After spending about 4 of the 6 hours half a buy-in down, I managed to win it back to even and leave $5 ahead. I call this victory. I was down, I didn't get good cards, and it consumed hours. I went on tilt minimally. I broadened my playing hands some, but quickly realized it wasn't going to turn things around, so I went back to auto-pilot to wait for good cards. Important to note, I switched to looser tables as I tightened up again.

What did I do different? Less breaks. In part I wasn't ahead, so I didn't think I needed to preserve winnings like before, so there was no getting up to make sure I didn't stay around thinking I was invincible. I went on auto-pilot whenever I was down, and did the textbook plays, not looking for tells. When I did look for tells, I kept it to the person to my left, hoping to notice something in how they hold their cards/chips to see if I could predict the action after me. I did alot less tell-looking.

Sets did not pay off, which tempted me with tilt. I'm thinking to myself, "I waited hours for this, only to be drawn out by flush and straights, even thought I'm betting the pot."

Is 6 hours unusual to have a streak of bad cards? AK, AA, and AQ not getting action, my pocket pairs not paying off? KK doubled my stack until I was even when it held up against AK. Or is this myself having the bad side of variance with good moments not paying well, and waiting it out until my rare strong hands paid off?

6 Hours is hardly a large enough sample size to determine this. Your experience is common to all "grinders" and for that matter, can last days, weeks, even months. THIS IS PART OF THE REASON WHY PEOPLE WHO PLAY GET THE LABEL "GRINDER" CAUSE IT CAN REALLY BE A GRIND SOMETIMES!!

Downswings happen. A downswing is a period of time where you are running bad, getting drawn out on, not getting cards, etc. The best anyone can do when this happens is minimize the losses. A good player will win 60%-70% of their sessions lifetime, and lose the rest!!

You have just experienced a common session for many. If you can't handle this, then poker may not be for you. You will have many more sessions like this, including those where you don't come back and even lose every hand!! Understand that a good sample size to determine IF you are a winning player is close to a thousand hours live. You are just beginning your journey, so keep plugging. The key to being a winning player starts with mastering the mental game, which can be brutal. This game will test you wits, your emotional stability, and your soul. Be prepared. There are good books to read on this topic, so check one out.

You spelled months wrong.


You can easily go on 10k hand downswings, even as a true winning player. Sit down and calculate how many hours of live play that is, and how many weeks/months it'll take you to get there at your current rate.

I just want to note that chasing losses is as inhibiting as preserving wins. Repeat after me: "You start every hand at even."

It's part of a broader mindset, more easily said than practiced, but it will help you separate yourself from the money.

Axe,

I've been following your thread outta curiosity more than anything. The title of "grinder" made me look the first time....

I need to amend my intial comments about "it sounds like you know some of the basic's of the game". This is not true, well...maybe the very basic's.

Just from this thread it is obvious that you're a losing player. Nothing wrong with, many/most people are -just the facts, calling it as I see it.

From your most recent post; this idea that you'll go play for 6 hours, play a simple ABC game and be a winner is seriously flawed. You have some serious fundamental problems with your poker game.
**Including, but not limited to; staying for a long time because you're losing, and leaving when you're winning. This is flawed thinking. When you're on a heater and winning you need to stay as long as you can -as long as things are going you're way / when you're having a losing sesssion you need to pickup and leave -and have the knowledge and discpline to recognize this situation.

Respestfully, you're not a grinder and not a winning player. Before you can ever be a grinder, you need to be a winning player.
The best advice I can give is for you to spend some time working on your game, away from the table.
This idea that you have of playing a simple ABC game, make the nuts, bet, have some dummy call, ...and/or, make the nuts, wait for someone else to bet, then ck raise, and have some dummy call, and/or always wait for premimum hands and then play so passively that you allow people to draw out on you -because you can't read thier hand, and somehow thats going to make you a winner??????? -when you don't even undertsand any of the strategic concepts of the game!

A good start would be to dive into the strat forums on this site, live low stakes. You need to work on your game, currently you're not even a "decent" player. You will never be a winning player unless & until you work on the basic fundamentals of the game you bring to the table. And I'm not trying to break your balls here, just some honest advice to help.

Bec of this thread I paid closer attention to what I do while playing and one of the things is that I'm always watching the dealer. Since I play the faster/more multi-way LHE I have to be sure that I know how many ppl are in the hand and watching the dealer/players helps. But I watch even when not in a hand which (sick brag) the floors know I do and often enough ask me what happened when there's been confusion.

I realized that this alone stops my mind from wandering off during a long (for me since I rarely play beyond exactly what I know to be my limit of 7.5 hours) session.

Just a little perspective. In many rooms, you get about 30 hands per hour. That means you'll be dealt 180 hands. In that time on average you'll be dealt 10-11 pocket pairs and if you play them all, you'll hit a set once in that 6 hours session.

So when you said the sets were coming less frequently, do you mean you only hit one or two in your session? If that's the case, you were running average. If you didn't hit any, it would be less frequent than you should expect and for "grinders", quite common.

Axe, just the statement that PPs and sets were few and far between is a red flag to me. A winning player can get dealt 27o every hand and adjust and find ways to profit. Your cards should not determine if you win or lose long term... They only will determine exactly how much you win.

FWIW, I hate, absolutely hate, the belief that you play for a fixed amount of time or until you lose a certain amount of money. In both cases, the threat of that threshold will significantly affect how you play. If you are playing well, keep playing. Stop playing when you no longer are on your game. I sure as heck am not going to stop playing because I lost a monster hand where my opp caught a one outer after I bled all his checks into the pot. A hand like that would just validate that I'm on my game and need to keep plugging.

I asked you in my very first reply to you if you were a winning player. I now know what the answer will be if this^ is your approach, your mindset, to poker.

You first need to understand and accept that poker is about math. Suckouts happen. Players draw against you and get there. So, why would it 'hurt' you when it happens? It NEVER should.

Winning poker is not achieved by playing on autopilot unless you're playing at a table with 9 baboons(and I've known a few baboons that might suggest otherwise).

I just don't hear it in your voice. I don't sense the true desire, or the determination from you. I just don't. I don't feel it's coming from your gut. And in all honesty, I haven't heard one word from your update where I thought, "ok, he's getting the hang of it".

You seem so victorious when you leave winner after one tiny little session yet you get so defeated when you lose a tough hand. And, Axe, You need to NOT feel this in your brain. This is BAD thinking. I mean, it's fine if that was your first and last session of poker that you were ever going to play in your entire life...but is it?

Also, you are making it way too difficult with this whole "tells" thing. Who told you to go about it a certain way? Are you a robot? "I only looked left" (bla bla bla). Why? Don't the other 8 players matter to you? Again, this part of poker( albeit it IS important) should still be a natural flowing occurrence and awareness that happens in your brain, in your gut, when you're at the table. If it's exhausting you? My friend, you're doing something terribly wrong!

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula that is going to make you a winning player or even a player who possesses the desire to play, which is so ****ing imperative for a live player. My best advice to you is to just keep playing. Play lots of hours. Post lots of hands in the strategy forum and start fresh. You're nowhere near grinding status yet.

Try always to play your best and have patience. You are there because you want to win some money and you also enjoy poker.

Do not tilt. People play better when are winning, when you are losing, dont play losser to chase losses. Dont make the mistake to eat like a bird and **** like an elephant

Play fast when ahead and be careful in marginal situation. If you play full ring, fold a lot

Improve your endurance, 8 hours focused will be like 3 in a while

Do exercices, dont drink in the table, chat with people, if you are nice they dont care about losing to you

Play more when wining and less when losing, sometimes you are tilting and dont know

Dont play angry, lose 2 buy ins, go home, when you win well and have more then 10% of your roll in the table go home.

Find who are giving free money to the table, but be solid

Be a nit, but use your image to bluff smal pots that know one wants, if you are a nit, thay always believe that u have something, but u bluff sometimes

Sound advice, and something I'm improving on each hand.

I apologize for some of the difficulty on the other post, as I wanted that post to be more trivial and lite than this one.

In hindsight, I shouldn't have put "grinder" in the title, as what I meant and what is heard are two different things. After the first paragraph, it sounds like tough but good advice, none of which is surprising to hear.

The fact I didn't go on tilt or swore revenge after the sucked out hand, at least I think, is a sign I can handle those 30-40% of times I'll have a session as bad or worse than this.

My first three hours, I had hit only 3 PP, so I was behind. Over the entire session, only 2 of my pocket pairs would have hit sets. The first one was 99 I folded because someone raised a 1/3rd of his stack pre-flop, so I wasn't going to chase his 2/3rd's left on the off-chance I hit a set (he had JJ). The other set was the last hand I played, and it lost to flush.

Maybe too aware of pocket pairs and sets.

You're thinking about statistics wrong. While the *long term average* might say that you should get 10 PP in 6 hours, the chance of getting a 3 hour stretch with ZERO PP is still fairly high. You might have 1/10 of your 3 hours sessions with no PP (number extracted from my ass, point stands). Which happens "often", and it's the kind of thing that people tend to notice.