In depth review of the GrinderSchool.com low stakes poker school

GrinderSchool.com review

(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)

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Sunday, December 6th, 2009 | Mark | Poker Articles, Poker Tools

This article belongs to the Poker Tools series

Introduction to the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school

GrinderSchool is an online poker school focused on helping low stakes players to win money consistently. They do this by offering members access to SNG, cash game and multi-table tournament instruction videos, as well as access to an active and well moderated poker forum.
The GrinderSchool team includes 15 skilled poker enthusiasts / professionals who are the main source of videos and forum threads.
GrinderSchool’s focus on low stakes poker strategy, combined with low membership costs, makes them a great resource site for poker players on a budget who are looking to improve their game.
Currently, the GrinderSchool poker school has more than 650 poker videos on file and with 5 new poker videos added each week there’s plenty to choose from.

Membership costs

The GrinderSchool low stakes poker school has two membership options, namely Micro stakes subscription and Full site subscription. Micro stakes subscribers have access to the GrinderSchool forum and all cash games videos with a buyin below 10$ and any tournament videos with 1$ buyins. Full site subscribers have access to the full GrinderSchool site (no surprises here)

A Micro stakes subscription will set you back 10$ a month

A Full site subscription costs 19,99$, if you pay one month a time. If you pay for more months in advance, the monthly fee drops. In fact, if you pay for 12 months in advance the monthly fee for the full site subscription drops to 10$ a month.

Payment can be made both through PayPal and via Full Tilt Poker.

If you ask me, there’s no reason not to choose the full site subscription, if you’re considering joining GrinderSchool. I believe the added value of having full access to all videos clearly outweighs the added monthly subscription cost.

In the following, I have chosen some of the features I like the best on the GrinderSchool site, as well as some of the annoyances I have experienced while navigating the site.

GrinderSchool poker school features – poker videos

Together with the GrinderSchool forum, the GrinderSchool poker video section is the heart of the low stakes poker strategy content on the site. You can find poker videos covering close to all of the aspects you need to take into consideration to beat low stakes games. I exclusively play multi-table tournaments, so obviously I checked out some of the poker videos in the multi-table tournament section. I liked the fact that each poker video has its own introductory page where it is possible to comment on the video, as well as read other user’s comments. In addition most videos are offered in both .FLV and .WMV formats with 0 DRM (Digital rights management) which means that members can download the GrinderSchool videos and use them however they please so long as they remain personal use only.

I looked through a series of 5 poker videos by a guy named AAPoker who walks us through the different stages of an 11$ rebuy multi-table tournament win on Full Tilt Poker. I really appreciated the way AAPokerexplained his thought-process behind each hand he played, and I was also pleased to have confirmed that you need a fair bit of luck to take down a big MTT tournament (the 3 2 hearts vs KK was especially amusing). It also made me realize, that I have to focus more on putting my opponents on a hand range when I play tournaments.

Here’s a list of pointers I wrote down after watching all the poker videos in the series:

During the rebuy period, be prepared to push all in with small to medium pocket pairs and high card combinations.
It is better to lose playing aggressive than lose playing passively
Min raises do not mean anything on FTP
Poker Tracker is a great tool to get stats on your opponents. Having a database of player info will give you an edge in some situations where tough decisions are to be made. Especially in tournaments where you get moved around a lot, and don’t often have time to get a read on players, it is great to stumble into players you already have data on from previous tournaments
Sometimes it’s good to smooth call when you hit good hands; it builds the pot and gives your opponent a chance to put all his chips in
If you’re raising short stacked players, just push all in instead and put the decision on them. You are going to call a re-push anyway.

GrinderSchool poker school features – coaching

If you are truly dedicated to poker, the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school offers private coaching as the fastest way to improve your game. I will go so far so say that all serious professional competitors – be it athletes, racing drivers or chess players – have had a private coach at some point in their careers.

GrinderSchool poker school features – forum

The bulk of the GrinderSchool forum is closed to outsiders to avoid the usual spam that these kinds of forums usually tend to accumulate. This means that almost all the content on the GrinderSchool low stakes poker school forum has poker relevance. You can actually think of it as a poker article database. Once you learn how to navigate it you will literally be able to spend days soaking up poker knowledge.

GrinderSchool poker school features – store

How cool is this? GrinderSchool has an online shop where you can purchase GrinderSchool low stakes poker school merchandise such as t-shirts, caps and mugs with the GrinderSchool logo. Payment can be made with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and Gift Certificates.

GrinderSchool poker school annoyances

First of all, the front page header is messed up in Firefox (3.5.5) on my Mac (Mac OS X Version 10.5.8) and run the latest. I have taken a screen shot of the header and included it below. The header looks fine in Internet Explorer and will therefore most likely also look fine on PCs.

In my opinion the GrinderSchool site faces similar challenges to many other online knowledge based sites. How to give users an overview of a lot of information while maintaining a clean and streamlined user interface? GrinderSchool have approached this problem by including a TAG cloud on both the forum and video sub-pages. I’m not sure how fond I am of this solution. The problem with organization of information through tags, is that if you do not have some kind of system on how to apply them to information, you run the risk of losing overview.

As a first time user, my impression of the GrinderSchool forum and video sections was that it would take me a very long time to get an overview of all the information present. What I’m missing is some kind of underlying information structuring that will allow me to faster navigate the site. On the forum there’s currently a lot of scrolling and clicking on multiple sub-pages, which I do not like.

Finally, I have to say that in my opinion, the overall appearance of the site is not up to 2009 standards. It is basically a large collection of interlinked static pages with a boring design. There are no dynamic elements which is a crime given the fact that nowadays there are so many possibilities of including dynamic elements to a web page. In fact, when I first saw the GrinderSchool site, I’m sorry to say that I did not get the impression they were a serious poker school. Their product is great, but it definitely deserves better wrapping.

Conclusion

Although I do have a few personal problems with the overall design of the site, I have to stress that this is a minor issue. It does not in any way take away from the fact that the GrinderSchool webpage is packed with quality poker strategy material. Additionally, the evaluation of design is always subjective. What doesn’t look good to me will most likely look very good to others.

In conclusion, I would recommend anyone who wants to learn poker and improve their game to sign up to the GrinderSchool poker school. The sheer amount of poker strategy material available on the site makes the low monthly subscription costs a steal. If you are new to the game, this could easily be one of the best investments you make in your entire poker career.

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5 Comments to GrinderSchool.com review

Dean Saliiba
December 7, 2009

It is always nice to read a very good, unbiased, review about a poker site. I’m a newbie poker player and am looking for a place online to start playing.

I’ll check these guys out.

Jeffrey JGB146 Blake
December 7, 2009

Just wanted to make a quick note that our header has been updated to have full compatibility with Mac browsers. We did not have access to a Mac when designing, so we had no means to discover the problem mentioned above. Also, we are in the process of developing an alternate search that doesn’t require use of the tag cloud.

Thanks for checking us out, PokerBRB! If the review is updated to reflect the header fixes, feel free to delete this comment.

Mark
December 7, 2009

Hi Jeffrey

Thanks for the comment. I can confirm that the header looks good on my Mac now.
I never delete any comments on my blog
Mark´s last blog ..GrinderSchool.com review

Jeff "CodeRedRulez" Lipsey
December 22, 2009

We’re offering a big promotion until the end of January. I posted more details in the forum post.

PokerBRB league final results for April’s competition
April 23, 2010

[...] (Well done James!!!). For his efforts, James wins another free monthly membership to the GrinderSchool.com poker school. I finished a decent third and more importantly took back my position as the player with most [...]