(Long post for context, scroll to the bottom for the meat and potatoes)

Greetings all,

When I joined this forum several years ago, I was a part time counter who thought 3:2 blackjack with solid rules and good penetration was the entire world of advantage play. Since that time, I've turned pro, learned about machine play, carny games, poker, tracking, and some online stuff, and have made hundreds of thousands of dollars while working as an AP. I've met some old school pros in the field, and heard about 500 variants of the gloom and doom story about how advantage play will be a thing of the past in five years time. While I'm sure things were easier back in the day, I never really took the naysayers seriously. I just expanded my techniques so that if I had trouble find one type of play, there'd be two others to keep me in action. Easy game.

Then, I had an unbelievable downswing. This wasn't like the downswings I experience counting. Those were fine for me because I knew I only had a 1% edge. These games I had a 10% edge, a 50% edge, even a 100% edge, and I still just kept losing. Literally nothing worked. I had one of the old school pros audit my game to make sure I wasn't mistaking play-bad for run-bad, and he just shook his head and said, "I can't believe how bad you run." Great, so I wasn't deluding myself, I was just cursed.

As the weeks turned to months and I continued to experienced losing or break-even plays while expenses chipped away at my bankroll, I started thinking about ways out. Going back to a finance job wasn't happening. I could scale everything back, grind 2/5 and machine plays, and live like a low-stakes pauper for awhile, but let's face it, grinding is cool when you're in college, but not so much when you've been killing it the last few years. Finally, I thought about a few offers friends had made for paid mentorship.

To be frank, I'd always thought considered AP training sites to be one step above a complete scam. After all, I started with nothing but the internet and a few books I'd ordered off amazon. How could I justify charging thousands of dollars for stuff I figured out on my own? But as the run-bad continued, I started almost trying to convince myself of its legitimacy: "You know stuff worth tens of thousands of dollars, why wouldn't it be alright to charge for it?" Suddenly the training site owners I looked down upon as failed APs were appearing more and more like sharp businessmen.

Whether it was was ego or ethics that stopped me, I can't say, but I never did train anyone. I scaled back, bailed myself out, and eventually the variance reversed itself. But even as my bankroll started to inch back to where it had been, the question remained in my mind: is training people to enter essentially a zero-sum game ethical? Any play is only worth so much, so by training others you are by necessity reducing the overall pie. Is this justifiable?

tl;dr: Even if you are selling information and techniques worth multiples of what you charge, is it ethical to do so if the more people you train, the more difficult making money will be for all involved? And bonus question: do you think most training sites are just run by APs who couldn't hack it, people who want money and damn the ethics, or just sharp businessmen looking for variance-free income?