Introduction

"Money won is twice as sweet as money earned."

Why would any reasonable person choose to gamble with hard earned money? The above quote—uttered by Paul Newman as pool hustler Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money”—gives us a pretty good idea of one reason. Sure there’s the lure of easy money. Sure there’s the excitement of putting your money on the line, trying to increase your fortunes in practically no time. Sure there’s the thrill of victory. But in most forms of gambling there’s also the house edge—the money that the house will always take away from you in the long run.

But there’s more to it than that. There are forms of gambling where you don’t play against the house. There are forms of gambling where people are pitted against each other. This is the type of gambling that interests me. This is the type of gambling where I think I can win.

I’ve selected two specific forms of gambling to begin my professional gambling career with. These two forms of gambling are poker and horse racing. Maybe you’re wondering, of all the forms of gambling available, why these two? The answer is, that in these forms of gambling you are not playing against the house where the odds are fixed against you. Instead, you are playing against other players, and their mistakes lead to your profits. Every time you bluff someone out of a pot, another poker player has made a mistake and you have profited from that mistake. Every time you pick the winner of a horse race, you have profited from the mistakes of those who selected a non-winning horse. People make mistakes, and if we can correctly exploit these mistakes we should be able to profit from them.

How, you might ask, can we make sure that we are the ones making the profit and not the ones losing to other players? The answer is hard work, study, and mathematics. Through these tools we can increase our edge over the other players. In both horse racing and poker there is information available to all of the players. However, only those with the knowledge to properly use this information can exploit it profitably.

It is for this reason, I intend to begin this blog by sharing with you some of my philosophy of gambling, some of my favorite sources of gambling knowledge, and some of the techniques I intend to use to grow $250 into as much money as I possibly can. Then I intend to keep everyone updated as to my wins and losses, and my progress in the field of making money through gambling.

Look soon for my first entry on poker, and the strategy I intend to use to make as much money as possible via online and live poker.