Grinder

Also known as: grinding, grind

A player who profits through high volume and disciplined, repeatable edges rather than occasional big scores.

A grinder treats poker as a job: large volume, tight game selection, controlled variance, and a small-but-real edge applied thousands of times. Cash grinders multi-table mid-stakes; MTT grinders fire dozens of tournaments to smooth out a high-variance ROI. The mindset is bb/100 and long-run sample, not the result of any single session.

Grinding works because of the law of large numbers: a modest winrate is only meaningful over a big sample. The flip side is that grinding demands bankroll discipline (MTT players want ~50–100 buy-ins because the downswings are brutal) and emotional stability, since the same hand replayed many times will sometimes lose many in a row without any leak being present.

It's not a strategy so much as a work ethic. The best grinders pair the volume with ongoing study — logging hands, reviewing spots, and plugging leaks — so the per-hand edge keeps growing while the volume compounds it.