I want your help. I'm down thousands and I've been playing for over hundreds of hours.

#1
**Long post so get ready boys n girls.**

Hello everyone. My name is Robin, but you can call me Robinhood, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm relatively new to the forum, having only created an account a few months ago. I come seeking the guidance of the made men (and ladies!) of the card counting crowd. I've lost well over $12,000 the past year trying to count cards professionally, and I've made a numerous series of rookie mistakes that have cost me tons of EV, and the window of opportunity is getting smaller and smaller and I can feel total bankruptcy on the horizon. I want to turn this ship around and get in the green and I'm not sure how.

Here's a bit of backstory to how I came across card counting and why I wanted to pursue it as a potential career.

I'm in my mid twenties. Around early 2020, I got laid off from my full time job of six years as a gas station shift manager due to a drastic cut in hours over the coronavirus pandemic. I started to pick up more hours at one of my part time gigs. By December of 2020, I was also let go there too, and soon found myself jobless. I began collecting unemployment at the start of 2021 and have been in and out of employment ever since. It was during the first few months of my unemployment this past year that I began playing BlackJack and going to my local casino out of pure boredom and to kill the time I had on my hands.

After losing somewhere around maybe $4,000 or $5,000 playing BlackJack as a ploppy for three months, something dawned on me in the back of my mind that BlackJack was a beatable game, then I came across BlackJack Apprenticeship and Colin's videos, and I got super excited and into the concept of being able to actually consistently beat a game in the casino over the long run with due diligence and effort. For most of April, May, and June of this past year, I studied three to four hours at a time per day, from basic strategy to Hi-Lo, keeping a running count and doing true count conversions, to the Illustrious 18 and the Fab 4, even to well over thirteen other playing deviations.

I would say my card counting efforts started in late April, and at first I hit some serious initial successes. For most of late April and most of May this past year, I was up well over $8,000, and at one point I believe I almost made it to the $10,000 in profit mark. But then everything started to come crashing down on me.
My initial bankroll of $2,000 came from some investments I made in cryptocurrencies over the past four years. I borrowed against it because I wanted to see if this thing could work. I could clearly tell it did, considering how much success I had in my first two months of card counting. But in hindsight, I had major gaps in my playing style, as well as in the area of bankroll management (my weakest area even now I'd say) and controlling my emotions during losses. These mistakes cost me greatly and I haven't recovered financially or emotionally since.

For starters, I never decided on a bet spread according to my chances of going bust vs. my chance of growing my play money (calculating risk of ruin). I just took that initial $2k and went for it into the casino for those first two months, and was betting anywhere between $15/$25 table minimums to sometimes $250 to $300 per hand (I was merely scaling my bets according to the count, not including risk of ruin with such high spread). I'm surprised I didn't go completely broke sooner. But I digress. I also made the mistake of jumping into a few shoe games that were in progress, and forgot to add the discard pile to the undealt cards remaining in the shoe for my true count conversions. This seemingly simple mistake cost me somewhere between $1100 and $3600 during the past spring/summer months on more than a couple of games, when I was keeping solid track of the running count but varying my bets incorrectly because I wasn't including all the necessary decks that remained to be seen. Not only that, but when I started to encounter simple negative variance, I struggled to maintain my composure and roll with the punches some days, and took to drinking and getting sloppy with my playing style by playing side bets like MTD or LL, and things tended to snowball from there. I also failed to bring enough cash on hand to weather the storms.

Long story lousy, I lost everything I had made in profit this past summer, and then some. I eventually took out all of the funds in my cryptocurrency holdings and tried to make one last ditch effort at saving this dream job goal of mine this past summer to no avail. I lost everything. Well over $10,000. which took me about three years to accumulate, wiped out in just a few short months between sloppy playing, poor bankroll and risk management, poor emotional self control, and an inability to look inside of myself to pause momentarily to see where I went wrong. To make matters worse, once my local casino realized I had lost everything I made with them over this past spring/summer, they back roomed me and trespassed me from the property. Being the rookie that I was (and still am), I signed the stupid trespass acknowledgement form, so now I can't even play stupid if I go back there because they have my John Hancock on that slip of paper, AND my ID and ALL of my info got databased.

Since that time, I took the rest of the summer off to brood and reflect on my poor playing decisions and my mistakes. I've been unable to shake my resentment of the world around me and the direction this "adventure" took considering how much time I have already put into it to no avail to my own well being. It was only recently (a few weeks ago) that I started playing again out of habit, nay addiction to this game. I love BlackJack. I love a challenge. I HATE losing and CANNOT stand it. I HATE giving up on something after devoting so much time and effort to it, just to walk away in defeat. And unfortunately, I love probability and the math behind this game, so I continue to play even now. So I've been trying to be patient with myself, and ask myself where I went wrong and what I could have done differently. I bought CVCX, ran a few dozen sims and got a solid picture of my RoR, swallowed my pride and admitted that I was doing bankroll management all wrong and my bet spreads were not correlating correctly. I double checked my basic strategy, found 7 or 8 common misplays and corrected them; my basic strategy is now perfect. Then I refreshed my memory on deviations, the I18 and the Fab4. After arming myself with this knowledge proper I've been going back to the nearest casinos and hitting them consistently for a few hundred dollars at a time. I started with $1500 and have since doubled it, but have had to take money out periodically to pay down life expenses.

Here's my present dilemma. My bankroll is tiny. Right now I can only afford to play with $2100 (life stuff getting in the way). I just got backed off from playing at another casino not too far from where I live. They said I'm in a database, that they "have [my] picture, my plates, and my playing behaviors" and should I try to come back and play they would trespass me. That casino was the last decent casino that I was allowed to play at within a four hour drive of where I live (I live in New England).

What the fuck do I do? I've corrected my playing mistakes and my basic strategy is on point. I can play basic strategy in my sleep. I know all of my I18 deviations by heart in addition to the fab 4. I can keep the running count without error, my deck estimation at half deck increments is sometimes a little sloppy, but not by any margin of error that could cost me serious EV. I'm trying so hard to make this into a career but I think I may just be working with too small of a bankroll to get this thing off the ground. With the last decent casino in my vicinity with decent rules and penetration barring me from play, now I have to travel well over four hours to get to anything worth my time.

Should I just give this up? I've tried my best to swallow my pride and look at what I could be doing wrong, I've corrected nearly all of it, but now I'm faced with a dilemma; I have nowhere to play with low stakes and good rules for a low rolling counter without threat of arrest or ejection, and I'm not the type to cause anymore trouble than its worth. I don't fight with casino management I take it as it is and go about my day. I also have not been tested by a professional player (someone who is profitable and has been doing this for a long time as either a side hustle or a career), so all I've had this whole time to rely on for self discipline and skill testing has been me. This sucks and I hate it. I need help and I'm not getting it.

What would you do? Should I build up a bankroll from a full time job in the meantime? Wait to come back to this once I have more than a couple grand at my disposal? I'm torn. I'm considering taking out a loan (pre approved for up to nearly 17k) and paying Colin from BJA to test me out with some of that money, then just going for it with the rest. I can't stand it guys. I fuckin hate retail, I hate the trades (I've done carpentry, construction, landscaping), I hate working for other people . It's killed my soul. I'm miserable and I hate it. And I feel like I finally found something I think I could be very very good at, if not the best if I really wanted to push it all the way to my limits and practice like an animal for the rest of my life, but I'm floundering.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I apologize for the long wall of text but I couldn't think of a better way of explaining my present situation without giving y'all the full DL.. I'm open to criticism and hearing what the professionals here have to say. What would be the right move? I'm finally making progress but my options are limited. What's next? Thanks for reading.

- Robin
 
#2
Get a casino dealer job. You still have fun of the game. Making a living of it and seeing how the players losing money, ultimately, you will come to a conclusion, which is that extremely few people can make playing bj for living.
 
#3
I understand your feelings as I'm down 8.4K in last 54 hours. However after reading your story. Sounds like the time you became a winning player, you had lost majority of bankroll and lost that window. Which puts a tight squeeze on yourself. I wouldn't pay Colin for test(5k I think). CVCX and Casino verite have these readily for you. If you have family or wife I wouldn't risk loan of 17K while not having stable income. I took 21K loan simply for card counting but have legit income source as Mechanic. Look how it is for the moment? I'm forced to play even if I don't want too. Due to being in the hole :p I suggest taking your mind off it for little bit like month or so. Then recheck your game. Which is what I'm currently doing. Even in Colin Jones book he talks about high "Emotional intelligence" is better than traditional intelligence when comes blackjack. This game is very tough to beat, keep that in mind. So sit back and take breathe, you will likely experience this several times if you continue play. Smoke some weed, have drink, go get laid....Just don't do any above listed before or at the tables ;)
 

KewlJ

Well-Known Member
#4
Just my opinion, but taking a loan for beginning BR seems like a terrible idea.

I and a number of other players started small, playing very low stakes and built BR from there. It takes time. But you learn for sure that you are playing a winning game.

I am not suggesting that any of you guys down thousands of dollars after 50 hours, 100 hours aren't playing a winning game. Maybe you are and it is just variance. But on the other hand maybe there are some holes in your game. I wouldn't take a loan and add a whole new expense until I was 100% sure and then only as a last resort if there was no other way to raise or build a BR.
 

johndoe

Well-Known Member
#5
Get a straight job until you build up your bankroll and ensure your game is at 100%. Much more EV there. Then do it part-time. Full time AP is very difficult and pretty much requires a ton of travel, especially if you continue living in the northeast.

A few red flags though, is your propensity to gamble (at least historically), and that you HATE losing, etc. It might not be for you. Do it as a hobby for a while more.
 
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