
Originally Posted by
Checkways
I
don't understand why you can't be a
grinder and still shoot for the big games? Sure it takes the
grinder longer to get there, but they will eventually do it if they're good. Many of the pro players you see on TV are grinders. Actually, almost all of them are. It took some of them at least a decade to get to the big games but they did.
You can't
tell me that Chip Reese, Harmon, Greenstein, etc aren't grinders. They play a $4k/8k game where their
edge is small if not non exsistent. I'
m sure that they average way less BBs per hour than we do. If they weren't grinders, you wouldn't see them every freakin' day at the Bellagio giving $1 tips to the dealers after pulling in a $100,000 pot.
That's really not accurate. Greenstein talks about in his book about how he'd regularly buy into any good game, as long as he had the money to do so, irregardless of BR management rules. As long as the game was soft and playing would be plus EV for him, he'd play in a game, even if he could only afford one buyin.
To me, a "
grinder" is someone that regularly plays one
level and grinds out a
regular income, typically just enough to live off of. They
don't have aspirations of
moving up to higher limits, they're just content to
grind out what they make, without taking any risks. This wouldn't describe anyone that's made it big in the world of poker, at least in terms of how they were before they really made it.
If this does accurately describe anyone in the big game, that's only because there is no other games at that buyin, and no higher
stake games out there. They've already came as far as they can, for the time being. If better and higher
stake games were available though, you can bet that they'd be looking to play in them.
The more I think about it, the more wrong I think you are. The fact that they're at the highest possible stakes that you can play at shows how damn motivated they were to constantly succeed at higher and higher stakes, and that they were never content to
grind it out at one
level for the rest of their lives. Of course they avoided going
broke by limiting the chances they took, but they never just settled for making $10 an hour ... or $100 an hour ... or even $1000 an hour ... They were constantly looking to build their BR up enough to move up to higher and higher limits.