If you're an AP, have you ever considered getting a loan to finance your playing

Assuming you can get a loan of $100,000 at 10% interest, would you not do so?

Only if you can stomach the downside. (worst case scenario.. losing most or all of it and having to repay from a Job or other source)

You can't be serious? I suppose with a RoR of absolute zero, I would consider such. I don't think absolue zero exists though. If so, I haven't found it.

What are the conditions of this loan and cost of defaulting?

1.) secured by your home? too high a risk.
2.) from the man on the streets - secured by life and limbs? too high of risk
3.) unsecured...risk = bad credit for 7 years. I suppose some might condersiter this risk acceptable.

Yeah. I have to wonder how likely it is for an AP who plays full time to actually finish a whole year in the red. I wouldn't do it personally as I think that's a bit too much stress but I'm wondering if any other people on here have considered it since a fulltime AP, probably makes way more than double their bankroll in a year on average.

Let's assume option 3.

Getting a loan to play BJ is not inherently bad, of course; it should be treated much like any loan for a small business. As long as you are ok with the risks, and consequences, then go right ahead. In fact, your RoR is probably a lot less than many businesses!

I think a 10% rate is way too high though, especially these days.

Johndoe, you're forgetting one thing. While the interest rates may be a lot lower right now than it has historically been, the number of lenders who are willing to give an unsecured loan for that low of a rate is very few and far between.

Disaster and Possibly

Probably a disaster for a beginning player to borrow money to play. Possibly for an experienced player it's ok, but they should not need to!:joker::whip:

How are you going to pay off a 10% loan (at compound interest no less) with a 1% advantage?

It's not a matter of needing too. Rather it's investing in yourself. No different than running a business you could say. I agree that for a beginner it would be a very bad idea.

Where do you get that a 1% advange = 1% ROI??? Think of it this way. If you have a 1% advantage and make that on your bankroll over the course of 240 days out of the year, is 240% not greater than 10%? Even with the 10% being compound interest, it still would only come out to be about 10.25% APR depending on how they compound it.

I'd be very leery of anything like that.I'm a firm believer in growing your BR thru play and discipline.
Mike Tyson always said he could run just as just as well at 9AM as he could at the crack of dawn and didn't understand why boxers all got up in the pre-dawn hours to run. I think Buster Douglas showed him there are no shortcuts.

I have done that, written a HELOC check to replenish a bankroll after I used the existing bankroll for a major purchase.

Of course, that's little different than using the HELOC for the purchase, right? My BJ funds and other funds are fully comingled.

It's not a totally crazy idea - but almost. This kind of thing happens on Wall Street all the time - margin trading. You would need to be:

1. really confident in your playing abilities; strike that, you'd better be damn good
2. able to play enough BJ to cover the monthly P+I payments
3. able to cover the P+I payments at a reasonable RoR
4. able to cover the P+I payments with other funding during negative variance
5. very, very disciplined in money management so as to always be with your risk parameters

If you could pay back the loan without BJ earnings without enduring a hardship, and if you are damn good, then maybe it's worth thinking about further.

The biggest problem I see is that BJ played well is profitable in the long run, but your loan will have to be paid back in the short run.

You dont think a 3 year loan would be long run enough? I'm guessing that would be the equivalent of at least 1,728,000 hands over 3 years assuming you play 60 hands an hour for forty hours a week and 240 days out of the year. Variance shouldn't be as much of a factor for that many hands.

First off you are not going to have a 1% advantage everyday you play. Secondly, your daily bankroll is not going to be anywhere near $100,000. You're making it sound like you should make $1000 (1% of $100,000) every day for 240 days or whatever. Not going to happen. And lastly, where are you getting this 10.25% comparative figure from? If you take out a mortgage for $100,000 plan on paying at least $2-300,000...and that's with an interest rate well below 10%! A mortgage payment of just over $800/month for 30 years will end up costing you about $300,000 over that period. I don't know what kind of payback period you're looking at , but you need to remember that you have to pay back both the principle and the interest, and if you do that quickly what are you going to have left to play Blackjack with? The only way 10% simple interest will equal 10.25% compound interest is if you pay it all back within about 2 months or so! You're looking at a very, very negative EV situation here. It would be like playing Blackjack with a 10% house advantage, only much worse!

Maybe. I have a fully unsecured line that big running at 4% and change that I rarely use. Though it's not for BJ!

But at a ballpark cost of $10k/year to have access to the $, it's not THAT bad, though it would seriously cut into your profits. It's pretty expensive cash.

Again, this is the same kind of risk/reward decision anyone running a small business or considering margin trading would make. It's fine if you're capable and can accept the risk, but a horrible idea for someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

There are not that many places where a game exist that will let you play with a 1% advantage and $100,000 BR. You certainly won't be able to camp out for days or weeks on end. Therefore you'll need a pretty sizable travel expense account on top of your BR. A years worth of travel and living expenses will be substantial, I'd guess it would be more than the interest you'd pay. So you'd have at least a $20,000 nut to crack, not $10,000.

At 10% interest over a 3 year period your monthly payments will be $3226.72. You will have paid back $116,161.92 assuming all payments are on time, etc. 3 years may be doable...except for 1 thing. There is absolutely no way any bank anywhere is going to give you a $100,000 loan with a 3 year payback period and monthly rates this high unless you're already a well to do individual who doesn't need the loan. Ever hear of a concept called collateral? It would have to be a loan secured by a second mortgage on your home, yacht, etc. You'd have to demonstrate that you can afford a payment in excess of $3000/month and you'd have to invent a reason (lie) for needing such a loan (I don't think "I'm going to spend it playing Blackjack" is quite going to cut it). Even if you could pull off such a fiasco it would be very, very, very risky!

You made a fundamental mathematical error! I get 345,600 hands over 3 years! You can't interchange weeks with days! At 8 hours per day you would have:

60 hands per hour X 8 hours per day X 240 days per year X 3 years=345,600 hands.

If you can't do simple math you probably shouldn't be looking into going this route in the first place.