Hello to all of the gamblers and advantage players out there. This is JJ, the author of this website. This is my story of how I went from being a compulsive gambler to being a professional advantage player.
My curiosity started when I was a teenager. I was always intrigued by the WSOP, and I would watch poker tournaments on television for hours a day and even fall asleep to these events. Flash forward to my mid twenties when my friend tells me that there is a local bar that hosts free poker tournaments with gift certificates as prizes. I recalled watching poker on television as a teenager and figured it would be a great experience, so I went to the bar and signed up to the event, and I was the first one knocked out after less than 30 minutes. I started watching YouTube videos from Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Doyle Brunson, and all of the other pros. One Month later, I got first place.
After about 6 months of playing in the free tournaments, I wanted to test my skills online. I signed up for an account with WSOP.com and deposited $20. After playing for 10 minutes, I doubled my money and thought that I already had the skills to be a pro. I had to leave the house for a while, but when I came back, I immediately started playing poker again and lost everything in 2 minutes. I kept playing, kept learning, kept winning a little, and kept losing a lot. It got to a point where I would regularly borrow money from a friend so that I wouldn’t overdraft in my bank account. I was so embarrassed to borrow money that sometimes I would let myself overdraft and pay off the fees when I got my paycheck from work. Although I was good at the free tournaments, I was the fish when playing with real money, and the sharks kept eating my bankroll.
Eventually I found the online casino TropicanaCasino.com and started playing computerized European roulette. I would start at $1 and do the Martingale strategy of doubling on every loss until I won. I thought this was the easiest way ever to make money, so I started betting higher and got my bankroll up to $800. I thought this was a foolproof strategy until I lost it all.
I had a coworker who was also into poker and gambling, and he told me about the live dealers on GoldenNuggetCasino.com being filmed on location. I thought live dealers were great since I became skeptical of computerized games. They had live roulette and baccarat with only a $1 minimum. I tried my luck on roulette and used a modified Martingale strategy. Instead of betting on a 1:1 payout and doubling on every loss, I would bet on a 2:1 payout with the progression 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 21, 31, etc. I made $60 and then lost everything when the column that I was betting on didn’t show up for 18 spins. I used all different types of strategies that I found on YouTube and all different types of strategies that I made myself. One strategy that I found on YouTube was called the D’alembert method. Instead of doubling on every loss, you only increase by 1 on a loss and decrease by 1 on a win. I used this strategy on baccarat and always bet on banker since banker should mathematically appear more than player. Within a week I made $1000, and then I had a session with multiple shoes in a row being predominantly player outcomes, and I lost everything again.
I was a gambling addict. I could make hundreds of dollars a day, lose everything, and deposit more and more and more money. I thought I could win. I knew I could win. That’s how gamblers become hooked. It got so bad that instead of sleeping one night, I stayed up all night depositing $5 at a time on Tropicana, playing roulette, losing everything, and repeating until I had to go to work the next morning. All I kept hearing on my way to work was the background noise of the roulette game still ringing in my ears from playing all night. Because I kept depositing $5 at a time, I didn’t realize that I actually put myself over negative $400 in my bank account. I was forced to sell a few of my collectibles just to be back at $0.
I couldn’t stop myself. I knew I could win, but I kept losing. I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I eventually sold the rest of my collectibles for $9000 in total when they were worth over $15,000 at the time. I always counted on my collectibles as a backup resource, and I finally cashed them in. Within four months, I lost everything. I was living paycheck to paycheck again, and I had no backup resources anymore. When it came time for my birthday, my father in New York City wanted me to visit him. I had always been a coin collector, and I had to pay the bus driver with rare coins from my collection just to go to New York City to rely on my $50 birthday money. These weren’t Sacagawea coins or Susan B. Anthony coins. These coins were so rare that the bus driver argued with me because he had never seen them before.
This still didn’t stop me from gambling, but eventually I started learning about advantage playing. Listening to the podcast Gambling With an Edge with hosts Bob Dancer and Richard Munchkin made me realize that gambling and advantage playing were two completely different things. Gambling is throwing your money around recklessly, but advantage playing is making precise calculations about casino games to actually have a mathematical advantage against the casino. Bob and Richard would invite a variety of guests to talk about all different ways of advantage playing. They would invite professional poker players, professional sports bettors, professional blackjack players, and they themselves were professional advantage players. They taught me how to be more disciplined, and I started implementing advantage playing myself. After six months, I had listened to 235 episodes, and I figured out a type of advantage playing that they never talked about on the podcast. I call my own type of advantage playing “loophole gambling,” and I’ve been using loopholes for the past few years to guarantee profits. This is how I went from being a compulsive gambler with negative $400 in my bank account to making just over two million dollars in revenue during the past two years. Subscribe now and learn how to actually profit from casinos. There is a way, and I can teach you. Please scroll down to see my 2019 and 2020 tax statements as a professional gambler compared against my bank statement from when I was a compulsive gambler.
– JJ