When Can You Declare a Profit?

[AmericanAirlines]

Ok all you bankroll gurus out there...

When exactly can you take bankroll money out for living expenses without increasing your risk of ruin?

I.E. when do I have a spendable profit?

Sincerely,
AA

[Jimbo]

When exactly can you take bankroll money out for living expenses without increasing your risk of ruin? Just an educated guess but how about never? I do not believe your risk of ruin ever reaches zero. If that is the case anytime you remove money from your bankroll you will increase your risk of ruin. I believe a more relevant question might be how much can you remove before you increase your risk of ruin beyond an acceptable level. That would be somewhat player dependent. Of course if I am incorrect BruceZ will be sure to correct me! [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[AmericanAirlines]

Hi Jimbo,
I always figured it was twice you required bankroll + 1 dollar.

The rationale being, until I have a buck more than my maximum expected draw down, a maximum draw down event would be cutting into my starting capital... hence I'd be in the red (if a max draw down did occur).

Make sense?

So in essence, If I were good enough to get by on Dave's reccomended 300 BB's then 601 bets would be my first truly safe profit.

Of course, I'm probably not good enough to get away with a 300 bet bank roll in all honesty.

I have seen 200 BB draw downs, though never more than 100 BB's into my original bankroll.

Sincerely,
AA

[D.J.]

Are you a pro? If yes then disregard this, if no then you can do whatever the hell you want with your money any time you want no matter how much you have. I don't think you have to worry about having X number of big bets in your bankroll if you're not playing for a living. Spend your money however you wish, leaving enough for you to feel comfortable playing the limits you normally play. Only you can answer what "comfortable" is. For me, if I want to play 15-30 I feel comfortable w/ as little as $3K. For others they may need $10K to feel right. Anyway, like I said if you're a pro, then I'm sorry for wasting your time, but if not, do what you want w/ your money as long as you have enough to not play scared.

-D.J.

[Jimbo]

AA you are now asking a different question. Here is a link to a post where BruceZ explains why it is much more complex than you indicate.

http://www.twoplustwo.com/forums/sho...art=1&vc=1

[AmericanAirlines]

Hi D.J.,
Fair question. Currently I am not a pro. I did give it a shot in Vegas a few years back, but simply put, I wasn't good enough.

I didn't go broke, but a .3 BB/hr win rate with wide swings didn't cut it. Especially since I hadn't gone higher than 10/20 stud.

An unsolicited job offer came and I left.


However, being self sustaining is an idea that's ingrained in me. Being a corp. dweeb is no fun. Unless I could see a way to double or triple my current income...soon.

On the other hand, if poker, or trading or some other "one man show" way of earning my current living worked, that'd be fine too.

In essence I'd like a "no boss, no sub-ordinates, no clients" way of living well. I.E, no politics, no schedules, etc.

So poker is always on my radar screen.

Sincerely,
AA

[Mash]

In essence I'd like a "no boss, no sub-ordinates, no clients" way of living well. I.E, no politics, no schedules, etc.
So poker is always on my radar screen.


Exactly! If I could get to that scenerio without comprimising my lifestyle, (ie. house to live in, car to drive, food on the table for my family) I would have it made.

Some other avenues that could create that lifestyle besides poker and sports gambling would be stock market and real estate to a certain degree. Even after losing my ass in trading commodities, I soon discovered that once the news hit me the big guys with the huge bankrolls already were in and there was no winning for me. Somebody like me making money in commodities is like hitting the lottery, same for stocks for that matter. Unless the company I work for goes up in stock 10 fold, using the stock I have accomulated the last 10 years I don't feel I will make any serious money in the stock market. Of course if the stock market of 1999-2000 comes back where any fool can make some cash, (like I did, only to give it all back in 2001), I can't see creating the lifestyle you mention above either. So that leaves Real Estate (I'm not taking about being a real estate agent either, I'm talking about buying and selling real estate for a profit.)Even then depending on what kind of real estate you buy you may have to deal with renters, which is also a pain in the ass.

I'm not talking about getting money for nothing, (like everyone else in this country is). I'm willing to do my homework, work hard to make some bank.

Maybe I should write a book to create some residual income?

[AmericanAirlines]

Hi Mash,
Well, I have a lifetime of thoughts on this issue, to say the least. None of the following is meant to discourage you. Some folks *do* make it. It's meant to state some things about the pursuit that I believe to be true. (And in my opinion are rigged by the upper echelon to keep the rest of us thier little peons.)

That statement you quoted really is an elaboration on the idea that all stress and agravation in life comes from "other people". So the real way to be happy is to be able to remove them from your life. But it's difficult, because all money comes from "other people".

So the stated ideal is to achieve complete independance from others.

At the summary level, what I've found is that if you aren't born into wealth, methods of getting wealthy seem to fall into a few categories:

1. If it works nearly for sure, it takes a lot of money to get into it. (Consider opening a MacDonald's... yes I know they are losing money at the minute... so make it a Burger King... you get the idea... large capital investment, high probability of success.)

2. If it doesn't take a lot of money to get into it, it's a long shot... and there's a lot of competition. (Consider starting a small business on a shoe string, or going to Hollywood, i.e the risk reward continuum is very steep... a few make tons of money, the rest starve.)

3. The long slow road to china...aka... go to school, get a job, save for years to pay off the house... blah blah blah... not really the American Ideal of "The Big Time". Also known as "wage slave".

4. Same as above, but do some extra school and become an Independant Professional (Dr., Lawyer etc.) or big time Wall Street type (Investment Banker etc.) But here, you usually have to have a chunk of money to go to school, and the big success stories (say Lou Gerstner of IBM fame) generally are Harvard, Yale, Wharton folks. (Some of these types are in my family tree. They started aiming for it in thier teens, literally.)

So if you didn't fit those profiles and are now stuck in working class wage slavery, well like most of us you want the sort of "out" that you quoted me on.

However, most of the things proposed to do so read like late night infomercials... ever really met anyone who "made a million in real estate using the Carelton Sheets method"?

I know of *one* that I went to high school with... Took him 20 years... and an inheritance... He bought his wife a hair salon to cover the bills with... while he did deals down at the local court house (foreclosures and rehabs).

The real deal in real estate is having rental properties large enough an profitable enough to hire a manager. But then you're in case 1 above again... need lots of dough.

Of couse you *can* go rip out old toilets, deal with tennants etc. yourself. Somehow I thing Oprah got a better deal, don't you. Somehow the American Economy (that's all us peons) voter her enough money to be a billionaire. That's absolutely f*cked if you ask me. Gee, think *we* can make a billion doing a talk show and a book club. Geez, I'd be curious about the details of that!

As for trading. Well I once held a Series 7 and 63, so I've seen it from the brokerage side. The market is *not* set up to make the small investor well off. Period. It's there to capitalize companies, and to make Wall Street rich.
Small investors are the fish... er ah... "liquidity to trade against" of that game. As they say in the biz, "stocks are made to be sold".

Let's face it, Wall Street firms are the "house" in that game.

In the end, since there's selling short and Options, you "can" devise a strategy to make money for any predicted market conditions. But, can you determine the probabilities accurately enough to know you are making a +EV position, and... do it before the market prices it in?

Oh... but what about "riskless arbitrage"???... good luck... even Options Guru Larry Mcmillan states... In Italics no less (in his books)... people not on the trading floor can't do it.

In the end, the trading pits are the biggest poker game going. What is f*cked is that it affects companies and working folks. The rest of our lives shouldn't be affected by what's happening in the pits in my opinion. If it is, it's engineered wrong. But that's only my opinion. I'm sure a lot of folks will chime in about all the good the market does, blah blah blah. A dynamic way if dealing with changing conditions and all that BS. I say we should be engineering the uncertainty those folks talk about out of life and the world in general. Who wants to be constantly chasing, adjusting, dodging the ax etc. What a complete waste of life.

Anyway, next time you go to a George Fontanills seminar and they are showing you all these "wild" strategies, ask this..

"Ah sir... since there a profitable option strategy for any market condition you can envision... ah... exactly how are you going to teach me to accurately forecast the probabilties of future market actions in way that I can build positions with Positive Mathematical Expectation????"

That should cut right the heart of the issue.

We can send a man to the moon (as they say) but we can't build a world that is economically stable and not based on an impossible to sustain "constant growth" model?

I think we *can* but entrenched interests have no interest in such a thing... and the rest of us, the majority are to chicken sh*t to do anything about it.

So what's this got to do with Poker and 2+2. Well something. With a book titled "How to make 100K a year gambling" we are forced to ask..."If any Joe Blow follows the perscription in the book will Joe make the stated amount?" I think even 2+2 authors will say it's unlikely.

So what have you got? Another long shot. Something you can work as hard as you can, and still end up on the short end of the stick... older, closer to death... no closer to the good life.

Hey... while I'm thinking about it, why shouldn't you want money for nothing? In effect isn't that what all the king pins of the modern economy really get (comparitively speaking)?

Come on there's only 168 hours in a week for all of us. What could an multi-bazillion dollar CEO really be doing in those 168 hours that is worth so much more than your life?

You're likely to spend you *whole life* trying to earn what those guys get for a month or two.

Sound *real* fair and equitable to me.

Geez, just let me do that job for a month or two and I can quit for life!

Yeah, just try to get that job though.

LOL!

Well, since you talk about company stock, I'm sure you're no stranger to the world of working class folks.

And as you know that can be a "who you blow" sort of game. As always the big question is, "How can you get to the big incomes without sucking d*ck?"

Well, apparently by going to Harvard Business School. But can you really do that at this point?

Then again, for that matter, can you really make 100K a year in poker? Well maybe it's *possible*, but how *probable* is it?


Well, I keep hoping!

LOL!

Let me know if you come up with a good idea that doens't require that we be fix-it-up toolbelt wearing turkeys.

:-)

Sincerely,
AA

[brad]

'
3. The long slow road to china...aka... go to school, get a job, save for years to pay off the house... blah blah blah... not really the American Ideal of "The Big Time". Also known as "wage slave".
'

as i understand it this is the american dream.

but just to play devils advocate, consider this: being rich is having other people work for you. its as simple as that. does anyone ever ask themself, why am i special that i deserve other people to work for me?

otoh once in this country you could carve out a piece of land and work it yourself and be self sufficient, and if that didnt define being an american i dont know what did. of course that is impossible now.

[AmericanAirlines]

Hi Brad,
C'mon now... the current American Dream is the "One Shot Kill", or "The Big Kill"... Hit it big and live happily ever after.

Otherwise, why would the lotteries get so large, and so many try thier hand at trading, etc. Then there's the infomercials. For Christ Sake, Carleton Sheets has been peddling that stuff on TV almost as long as I can remember.
The fact that he continues to rake in enough money to keep buying the commercial time is testimony to how many folks *want out* of the old "American Dream".

The message today is clear... if you're a worker... you're stupid. "Like hey, where's *your* Mercedes", she said.

Hollywood and Wall Street, the twin pillars of American Success... Looks and Money respectively. Heck, back in the 80's some jounalist speaking about the stock market even wrote that money had replaced sex as the American pass-time.
(Wonder what happened to baseball.)

No to respond to your Devil's Advocacy... Why is *anyone else* so special that I should have to work for *them*.

Yet that's what the majority does. That's the result of concentration of wealth... yes the result of the much vaunted "capitalism"... by any other name Social Darwinism.

I think we can thank Henry Ford for getting us to switch from self sufficiency to Corp. Paternalism if I recall history correctly.

Ah... but now... Corp. Paternalism is dead... that social contract is gone.... yeah, now that the top is so far and above the rest of us. We can all be part of the amorphous blob of "mirgrant workers" aka "contractors" or in it's glitzy Politically Correct form, "Consultants". (Ha!)

Now, as far as working a piece of land. *Yes*, you can do that... consider the beef ranchers on public lands in the west.... Nothing stopping you from going to the land bureau and seeing if they have deal for you... got enough money for the start up though? Even if the land is free?

But... now here's the acid test. With all the years you've been watching TV and been socialized by the prevailing norms, are you really ready to go slop around in some animal dung on a daily basis?

Somehow I don't think so.

Let's face it being a working slob, to most, is better than being an agricultural slob. But the real "dream" is to be in the leisure class.

But, there's not a clear cut way to get there is there.

So why do you think that is?

LOL!

Sincerely,
AA

P.S. For crying out load... no one in this bulletin board wants a "real" job. We all want to play cards for a living!

:-)

Guess we all want to be the old time Gunslinger/Gambler type rather than the old time Farmer type, wouldn't you say?