I quit

[LoneWoLF]

Many of you probably won't care about my story, but I will share it anyway.

I started learning to count around age 22 during my last year in college. I studied up as much as I could. The first 3 years i barely played and when i did it was only low stakes and i believe i lost about 2-3k, give or take as I didnt have a log at the time. I studied up as much as I could during those years and was basically a sponge, reading book after book and absorbing everything I could from the pros on this site as well as other forums and what they had to say. The year after that, I started to finally save up from two minimum wage jobs and so i played more but still not that many hours only about 150 or so that year and was only red chipping it. The result was only a couple thousand or so profit. Unfortunately it was enough to get me backed off at a sweaty joint for my first ever backoff as that's where the couple of thousand came from.

Around that time that year I also begain getting into the markets and slowly started putting money into a stock that I held for 3 years. I managed to save up 30k over those 3 years by grinding it out in the jobs that I worked at as well as playing part time blackjack whenever I could. I was up 95% of the time on the stock during those 3 years to the tune of 20-30k profit, but sadly I never cashed out and ended up losing 5k from my initial 30k investment. Also towards the end of the last year of holding the stock, before I cashed it out, I then started to take it really serious with blackjack. With a lot of money coming in by finally getting a somewhat decent job giving me 600 a week, I continued to save as much as I could and started to play more and was able to bet bigger stakes and with bigger stakes came attention from casinos.

I got up to about 25k profit within 300 hours give or take. Not sure of the exact hours because the way I track my hours is from when I get to the casino to the time i leave and not the actual time i count down shoes. So it was roughly 300 hours playing mid green low black and got to about 25k profit, but the last 50 hours or so have been brutal and gave back about 18k. During this downswing I lost my favorite casino to play at as I got backed off from there and left me limited casinos to play at, mainly the ones that I have always struggled at. This now leaves me at about 10k profit overall and in the green for the last two years of which I played part time starting at red chips to mid green-low black at about 500-550 hours or so and well below EV. If you count the first 3 years where I didnt keep a log an estimate is I lost about 2-3k so that puts me at only 8k in the green since I started this adventure and to me that's horrible.

This hasnt been worth it at all to me and I feel like I wasted so much time in my youth with blackjack that could've been put towards my bachelors degree that I earned when I was 23. I guess blackjack just isnt worth it if you have to constantly travel 1-1.5 hours to casinos because these 500 hours felt like an eternity and it's not even 1/2 of what blackjack pros play each year. I guess if one wants to make money at this, he needs to move to an area with a huge amount of games in close proximity, ie. Vegas, which was my plan but after my stock didnt work out, and the huge downswing, i now forgot about that. These last 3 months have been brutal.

Good luck to me, im gonna need it as im now 27 living at home with no job, no girl, not many friends anymore and with a degree that I haven't even used with also no real work experience that can help me with my degree. I guess the good thing is I have no debt, a car paid off, 35k in savings, and of course the worthless business degree that I might never use, but nonetheless I'm at a real crossroads in my life right now and not sure what to do. And yes, for the ones that can connect the dots, you can now see why I have been out of control on the forums the past 3 months.

#PrayForTheWolf