I'm the master of over thinking, distraction and burnouts. Or I have been a lot. When I get tired, instead of taking a break, I go for some more and more and more....

So I face the same problem as you, eventually. I get bored.

I agree with the first posters about balancing life and being happy outside to be happy inside poker. Not that I freaking do it. But it has happened in areas outside of poker and works.

For me, the answer to boredom is either taking breaks and fixing social life, or setting specific goals and targets in the game so that you remain focused, on track and motivated. Doing both is good IMO.

Work hard, play hard.

Chess complements poker and vice versa.

I'm super bored of poker so I play like 95% pineapple ofc nowadays

I got burned out on live games before. Never got burned out online. In fact, playing online is something I used to not be able to control. Just kept going with the "just one more hand" mentality.

Play live poker man. It's a good break from the online work and sometimes can be fun too.

chill with gf/bf, go hang with people all ways clears the monotony

Learn new gametypes, or just make a trip to thailand! Good weather starting soon!

Play one table and surf the netz to keep the poker fix going without burning out.

Take a break for however long is needed to play with passion and motivation. My last break was a couple months.

Take a break from playing and start studying the game and doing hand history reviews. You'll find it rewarding and come back to the game with a new motivation to play.

Not yet for me

go to work for 8 hours

I did in 2015, only played in 3 tournaments. I can't explain it, just lost interest. Then at the end of 2015 I quit my job and started thinking of stuff I like doing, why don't I just do something that I enjoy? Then I thought why not poker? Then when I started playing I missed staying away from the tables. So the past 6-7 weeks all I do is eat sleep drink poker. I wake up and play, and if I dont play Im watching poker, Daniel Negreanu or Phil Galfond instructional videos. I thought I was dedicated back in 07-08 but now Poker is all I think about.

I hope to play in the WSOP Main Event one day, even if I play it just once in my lifetime I will die a happy man. I just want to at least say I played in that tournament.

i really enjoy playing poker but when the results doesnt show up its good to take a break

Like

I got bored of no limit and then started to learn PLO which I fell in love with haha. This encouraged me to learn as many variations of poker as possible. I've only learned to play PLO8, 7card stud, and 2-7 triple draw so far, but it's so much more fun learning a new game. It's like finding poker for the first time all over again.

I would strongly encourage anyone who is getting bored with 1 format to learn and play other types of poker. There's nothing like learning something new.

Stop playing for awhile. I used to play 5 days a week live and 4 nights a week online it got repetitive and boring especially to my girlfriend. Take a break its great for the soul. Or bring a good tv show to watch while playing to keep u distracted.

Yeah poker is boring at times, in which case watching movies works with me.

I can play online cash games for about a half-hour before it gets too repetitive and boring. Regardless of the money, it's still a game and even when I win I feel I've wasted time better spent elsewhere. Tournaments can be even more soul crushing.

If I can play while doing something else, like watching a movie, it's tolerable.

I've been playing professionally for about 10 years, Definitely gets boring, Lack of motivation is real, But at the end of the day you must look at it like a job.

Try working 9 to 5 for a week

Or Meditate

Yeah, if you aspire to be a professional poker player, or you actually are grinding it out, your life, at best, will become miserable, but what's likely to happen to you is that you lose focus, make bad decisions, and get bored.

Stopping my delusional aspirations to becoming the next Tom Dwan was the best thing to happen to me in re: to poker. I could stop playing when I was tired and I was no longer putting pressure on myself to meet certain benchmarks by a certain period of time.

There was a period I was grinding out 2-4/3-6/4-8/8-16 LHE live at various casinos and I had seriously turned into those old belligerent players constantly screaming at the dealer for a setup.

There was one exchange where something really trivial got me so irate I went on a verbal tangent on someone and the floorman, whom I'd go on cigarette breaks with, gently asked me to calm down. I was really just impatient I wasn't getting dealt and loathing the prospect of waiting for hands for another 6 hours.

This, on top of the relative little money I was making compared with the time I was putting in, made me realize I didn't want to be a grinder and I went back to my old job.

Grinding those small fixed limit games takes the life away from you. I've been there.

I played poker part-time starting ten years ago, but when I wanted to make a go of it playing full-time something always derailed that. Most recently I was a live-in-caregiver for two to four days a week for an elderly relative during 2014 and most of 2015. I spent about half a third of my awake time after she fell asleep on studying.

Now I'm settled in with a full-time poker schedule, including sleeping until noon and staying up until about 4 A.M. I do that because many of the tournaments in the area charity poker rooms can fun from 7 P.M. until well after midnight. I find myself driven to succeed at poker in a way that I've never experienced doing anything else.

A lot of the TV shows that I watched regularly have fallen by the wayside. I feel too guilty to watch TV for more than about 3 hours a day, in fact, is was a relief when the football season was over and I wouldn't spend all that time watching games. I feel like I've let myself and my wife down when I'm not doing anything poker related. My wife is not putting any pressure on me, I put it on myself.

I track my time by quarter hours and make sure that I'm doing enough playing and studying to put in at least 50 hours a week. I used to play almost exclusively live tournaments. Now I've added online SNGs to help fill those 50 hours.

That doesn't sound like much fun, but actually it is. I love a challenge, and after working for more than 10 companies that either closed or moved, I don't worry much about how hard poker is or how difficult it is to make money.

Now that I've set aside 50 hours a week and added online play, I have time to learn and practice all the things I've been studying. I'm doing a lot more memory work, most recently I got some ranges from Equilab and memorized the top 10% of hands and the top 50% I'm seeing how players react to me opening 50% from the button. I want to memorize the tighter ranges so I know what to play against someone playing around 20% of their hands.

I should add that the reason I decided to work 50 hours a week is to limit my time. I don't want to jump from part-time to working 60+ hours a week and burn myself out. I had several jobs where I worked a bunch of voluntary overtime, so I'm not afraid to work hard--but I don't want to burn myself out. Fifty hours a week seemed like a good compromise.

I might decide that it's too much and I should ease into it starting with 40 hours a week. Or I might wind up playing a little more and add an extra 10 hours per month from time to time.

Today and tomorrow are SNG days. Saturday I'll be playing a deepstack live tournament. I make sure that I both play and study every day, so my 50 hours a week is usually spread across seven days. Most of my recent study has been either using flash cards for memorization or rereading/restudying SOPTP2. Next week I'll probably mix spend more time with coaching videos.

Poker is a great intellectual challenge, and every year I enjoy it more than I did the previous year. Now that I'm self-employed and depend on no one but myself, I can't imagine living any other way.

Nice story, GL