The Bot Farm

Lent is traditionally a time of sackcloth and ashes, and believe me I have made enough mistakes in the past few weeks to warrant a lengthy bout of self-flagellation.  But lets stick to the facts and then move on.  First, most of my time and energy, not to mention money, has been spent (squandered, wasted) on trying to get a handle on Rush poker, whether manually or by botting.  My consolidated results are enough to make a grown man cry, so I will just soften the blow first by mentioning that the losses shown here are partially offset by $300 of rakeback earned during these sessions.

Have I given up on Rush? Not at all, but I have taken a slight step backwards to let those with a bigger bankroll do some of the trailblazing.  It’s clear that a breakeven profile on those games will clean up on rakeback alone.  And most of the losses above were generated before the 2c-5c blind levels were introduced, when serious amounts of money could be lost very quickly.  On the lower limits the maximum buy-in is $5 so any future testing can be on a more modest scale.

There is a similar tale of woe on the forex front.  After months and months of discipline having paid off, I suffered a moment of madness and fell for a highly-hyped instant gratification EA, only to have it lose half of my hard-earned $100 bankroll in short order.  I then compounded the situation by taking the remaining good EA and cranking up the risk profile in order to recoup the loss.   Result – account emptied and MT4 switched off for almost the first time in two years.

The lesson from both of these wipeouts, and the reason for the post’s title, is that we can be in too much of a rush for our own good when it comes to making money and find ourselves out of the race before we know it.  Had I been more cautious in either of these markets I would have a better bankroll with which to exploit real opportunities when they come along.

So – confession time over.  Just remember – do as I say not as I do.  Not too downcast though, as I have multiple reasons to be cheerful.  Such as:

• making interesting advances in understanding the new Super-Roulette Beta, and the features it offers for staking adjustments and positive progressions
• being invited to help with further Betas of bots operating in the Betfair market, including football and horseracing systems
• making contact by way of this blog with smart people all around the globe who are travelling the same path and are generous enough to share their ideas

I had intended for some days now to write a post about the ratchet effect, and how stop losses and profit targets can be combined to claw you up a positive equity curve, even when the underlying market has an adverse trend (due to house edge, rake, spread, commission).  But that one needs a lot more investigation, as well as application in practice which should hopefully make graphs such as the above a thing of the past.

Thank you to all who have joined this blog as registered users.  I must confess I don’t know why so many have done so, as it confers no special privileges versus casual browsers (unless its a necessary part of subscribing for an RSS feed).  When the financial floodgates finally open however and I feel the urge to summarise the lessons of the past year in an ebook, be sure that you folks will be the first to have access to it.