Grinder

Grinding is as much a discipline as a style. It means playing within a bankroll, leaving a table that is no longer profitable, and treating variance as a cost of doing business rather than a verdict. A tournament grinder may go months without a final table and still be comfortably ahead over a year; a cash grinder measures the same thing in big blinds per hundred hands.

The word carries no disrespect. Most of the people who make a sustained living from poker are grinders, and very few of them are the ones on television.