By the way all, I need to stop and really take pause and admire my work so far in front of you all. I started in January with $10,000 and now I have $32,685! Tripled my money! I'm not a seasoned gambler necessarily (at least I wasn't when I started this gig in January) and I know people lose more often than they win when gambling, so this is all the more something to be proud of. Here's Murphy's Law though: If it was my money and I got to keep it all, I would probably have lost much more and only have like $1,000 left, if anything. But I think it goes to show that you need a little money to win some money. Just like they say it's easy to make money if you have money. I'm not saying people need to start with $10,000, but if you can play a bit larger some time and not worry about it, you can do pretty well. The other way to look at it though is that I only made $22,685 since I started in January and I'm probably now what you might call a gambling pro. If I play this out over a year at this rate I will have made about $55,000, which may or may not be a good salary depending on who you are or where you live, plus there would be no health or retirement benefits if you were on your own, so this pacing isn't as amazing as it seems for all the time I put it. Plus, there is a great chance of losing! I don't know what my point is except that I'm trying to decide how impressive my gambling has been going as I give you this glimpse into the experiences of a full time online gambler who is trying to share some tips and strategies and reviews of good places and games to play along the way. If you have anything specific you want me to try out, make your suggestion at feedback@gamblera.com and write "suggestion for Jay in the title."

Oh, and if you wondering why I am blabbing about everything buy my wins and losses this week, it's because I only had a few hours scheduled for "work" (gambling), so I lost $545 in Texas Hold'em and called it a week.

End of week:  $545 to $32,140

Yeah, I'm still playing around with some baseball bets because they are available daily and I love it, but you want to hear more about my luck in the online casinos I'm sure. Well, luck isn't quite the word to describe my week at the tables. I tried to work it at blackjack and never caught one good shoe. I had some hits on the match play with some decent change down, but overall it wasn't happening so I went to a new game: Free Ride. Now free ride is not the game to play when you are in bad need of stabalizing and increasing your odds to win as it's usually a slow and methodical loss (which was the case for me). But it is a world of fun, and easy to play while watching a movie and there's always the possiblity of a huge progressive hit. Of course, I was bouncing all over casinos and all across different games, but by the end of the week I moved on to casino hold'em, which is a table game version of Texas Hold'em but you play against the dealer only there is a progressive payout system attached like in Caribbean Stud or Free Ride. And afte getting down $5,500 from the early to the middle part of the week, I won back a few grand and closed out at negative $2,614. As John Cusak said in High Fidelity, who needs a drink?


End of week:  $2,614 to $32,685

Hi all. So I went back to sports betting this week, which doesn't help a lot of you I know, but it sure helped my bank roll. In the first few days of the week I hit three round robin baseball parlays for a total of $11,432 on a total of only $420 bet to accomplish that. I lost some bets as well ($1,000), but you play big to win big, and since I won my first bet, it was all found money anyway. I'm telling you, the round robin is the way to go. It's essentially bunch of parlays that are played in every combination just like a trifecta box in horse racing. Basically you pick up to 6 teams (at least on sportsbook.com where I made all of these bets because of the option and quick and reliable bet ratings and payments), and I did pick 6 teams on each bet. To simplify, let's say you do a five-team round robin. You place a dollar amount for the 5-team bet, as well as for each of the combinations of 4 team bets and 3 teams bets on down the line if you want. I bet $10 on the one 5-team option (that means all 5 teams I pick win), $10 on 4 teams option and $10 on 3 teams. Since there are only 5 teams, there is only one 5 team bet. But when you bet on 4 teams, there are 5 combinations of 4 out 5 teams to win, and at $10 per bet that's $50. I also bet on 3-team combinations, of which there are 10 ways for 3 teams out of 5 to win, so that's 10 bets at $10 which yields $100. When you add it all up, the bet costs $160 in total. That's $10 for the 6-game parlay $50 for the 4-team combinations, and $100 for the 3-team combinations. Now, depending how you structure it, if just 3 of your 5 teams win, you can get your money back. If 4 teams win, you will likely triple your bet at minimum. And if all 6 win, you win a lot...in this case, $5,000 on the $160 bet. Got it? Sure, a straight parlay pays out more than each of these bets individually, but then you can win so many more bets on the same teams and they add up. If all 5 teams win, you would have won 16 bets in total, which is what gets us to the $5,000 mark! And in baseball, where any team can win on any night, it's nice to know you can still win a lot even if one of your teams in the parlay loses.

End of week:  $9,720 to $35,299

I showed my mother how to play craps online for Mother's Day in preparation for a family bday celebration at land-based casino, and of course, she had all the luck. I told her the money was play (which it sort of is for me), but the dollars were real and when she went on a great run with hundreds down across all the numbers, we made $1,800. I took that and on Tuesday I tried my luck at Carribean stud in vegasonline and royalcasino, and I got murdered, not to mention the sites were sup-par. I lost the gains from roulette and never hit more than trips (three-of-a-kind) a few times. Pretty weak. I lost a few hundred on some baseball bets that were ill-advised, but made the games much more fun to watch! And finally I won a bit back in blackjack on two different sites. All told, my account took a $2,270 hit.

End of week:  $2,270 to $25,579

I'm baaaaack! Back from my two-week vacation which included a Caribbean cruise. The trip was actually part of a wedding that I was in for a friend of mine and very fun, thanks for asking. I admit it was hard laying off the tables in the ship's casino, but I can be laying down my own cash given the freeroll from my employer Gamblera after all. I do admit that I joined the women in our group a few times for some roulette and bingo, but that was just child's play for fun. For a guy who is control of his gambling though, it sure is great to be back at "work" with my $23,309 stake as I review these sites and blog for you all.

Anyway, I dedicated the first three days back to the poker rooms for a total of about 20 hours. I played at my staples: sportsbook.com and fulltilt, and I pulled in a fair $900 for all my efforts. After that, I decided that I might as well make it a solid poker week. I tried a bunch of new casinos that gamblera.com had wanted to make a first screening of, and they were crap. I made some money with the help of a few small first-time despositer promotions, but the interfaces were garbage, the rakes were week and the tournaments were garbage. I told gamblera no need for a second opinion and no need to even list them here (one is actually now listed on our blacklist page for spam/illegal activies). From there I closed out the week at a site that gamblera has ranked No. 2 at the time of this writing, titanpoker.com. A few of our staff raved about it, but what I initially saw was another Playtech site (which are always solid) pleasantly surprised me. For a poker room that gets no pub and doesn't market much, the quality, players, support, rakes and touranments were great. I also made $3,234, but that's not supposed to factor into my opinion much according to my review guidelines here. I should say that gamblera.com is great about the reviews and doesn't get into affiliate parnterships unless sites are objectively ranked highly first, and if a site falls out of favor too far, we remove the site and the partnership altogether, so I would call it a great resource for you newbies and seasoned online players alike.


End of week:  $3,315 to $26,624