#209: “Do Grinders Dream Of Electric Cards?”

My brain is frazzled. That’s the only word for it. I told Saron at the start of this month that in order to maintain Supernova status for 2014, I was going to have to play 100-120 hours of SNGs/MTTs in December, all while fitting in 5 days for the Prague Festival and a few days off (I hope) around Christmas/New Year. She scoffed at me: “Eh yeah, honey, so basically what everyone works in a normal month.” She makes a fair point. It isn’t much different to normal working hours. However, it is a bit different. There is an auto-pilot aspect to most jobs; periods in the day when you can switch off, let your mind wander for a bit and incur virtually no loss. In fact, studies show that this type of approach actually increases productivity for most people.

Not so for online poker players. The slightest lapse can cost you thousands in equity. A tiny misclick can undo hours of hard work. And when it’s SNGs that you’re grinding, you don’t even get the five to the hour break. It’s non-stop, relentless button clicking, fifty to seventy clicks per minute, three to four thousand clicks per hour, twenty-five thousand clicks per session, three hundred and fifty thousand clicks over the month. It’s knowing all your Nash shoves. It’s knowing when to diverge from Nash. It’s remembering your line up to the turn in the game on the bottom left of your screen while working out that the villain’s range in the game top right is capped, interspersed with thirteen folds, three opens, a flat, two shoves and an all-in call, all while keeping one eye on the lobby for a slightly less reg infested new SNG about to start.

To put it another way, it’s going to be about $160K in buy-ins, spread over 3000 tournaments. To put it yet another way, I’m 6 days in and I’ve already started dreaming poker. And I’m not talking about those nice James Bond-esque dreams where you are playing live in a plush casino for hundreds of thousands, sitting back in your chair trying to soul-read your opponent. These are terrifying Tetris-esque dreams in which all I see are poker hands made from pixels, in which the Pokerstars prompting noises ceaselessly beep and in which I am a virtual plate-spinner condemned to eternally rinse and repeat. I wake up exhausted and then realise my work day is only just beginning.