When I turned 18, there was a casino about 2 hours away on a reservation that I could get into. We'd get paid on Friday night, head to the gas station near us that would cash a paycheck, pile into my crappy little Ford, then make the drive. We'd get there a little before midnight and everyone had their own game.
The second time we went, one of my friends was hypnotized by the craps table. There were 16 players standing around this sea of green, and every minute or so, you could hear them screaming at the top of their lungs like they just won a million dollars. On the way home that night, I taught him everything I learned from books I'd read about the different bets. "Smart" bets where the house edge was only 1.4%, all the way down to the risky ones where the house edge was over 10% (meaning that for every $100 wagered, you should expect to lose $10).
The next time we went, we hung around the table, trying to figure out the right way to bet. It seemed a little complicated, so we tried other games. At the end of the night, I had the last $10 and he asked if he could borrow it to go place a bet. I handed it over, then went to the bathroom in preparation for the ride home. When I finally found him again, he had a stack of chips in front of him. He had been gone for about 5 minutes and already turned $10 into a few hundred. Well, if you can turn 10 into 100, you can turn 100 into 1,000 just as easily. We left empty handed that night, but I'll never forget the rush.
I loved blackjack. I learned how to play at an early age from my uncle, who would always cheat and take my money. He'd say "I just taught you a very valuable lesson." He actually taught me two: 1) if you play against a casino, you may have a good night and win thousands of dollars, but if you keep going back, you'll eventually have nothing left. 2) My uncle was a scumbag who continually cheated and took my money, then told the family I was a poor sport and they couldn't understand why I hated doing anything with him. One of my earliest memories at the casino was running $100 at the blackjack table into $3000, which is more than I made in a month of bussing tables. I went home, paid my rent and blew the rest on useless things I can't even remember.
What does any of this have to do with $GME? Well I'm still chasing the same high as I was when I was 18. I don't go to the casino anymore, but I've got something even better on my computer. I bought $2k worth of weeklies on Jan 25. Before everything crashed, they were worth over $100k, more than enough to fix most of the problems I've caused in my life. BUT, I was still standing around that craps table. The roller had just made his 30th point in a row, $GME was on fire and couldn't possibly roll a 7! I put my 2k back in my pocket and shoved the rest on the pass line. A few minutes later, the croupier inevitably yells "7 out!" and just like that, I'm back to nothing.
Now I do what every moron around the table does. You reach back into your pocket, pull out the 2k and make a deal with your maker. "Just let it happen one more time. I won't be greedy THIS time and I'll stop when I hit 50k." I stop looking at the smart bets and start eyeing the center of the table, where hard ways are paying 10:1. Yeah, that'll be how I get back to 50k. A couple of those in a row and I can put a down payment on a house. 5 minutes later, I'm on my way out to the car and I feel like I've been punched in the gut. Again.
Every one of you in this subreddit is another person sitting at the casino. Everyone has their game. The people holding $GME stonks right now? You're playing baccarat. If you've never heard of it, it's what James Bond plays in the old movies. It's about the most boring thing you can do. Two hands are dealt and you're betting on which one wins before anything happens. There's no actual skill and it's the same thing as betting heads or tails, while losing 1% of your bet every time.
The people who cashed out and picked something else like $AMC or $BB? Those are the slot players. You had a big hit and now you're going to switch machines because the other ones are "due". You're looking for the exact same magic, thinking there was something smart in your play, when it was really just dumb luck in timing.
The people saying "If Daddy Elon or Cowboy Cuban gets in, we can trigger a squeeze!" You're the guy who spent too much money in the first 20 minutes of the trip and now you're begging everyone else for a loan.
Tldr: Nothing is happening with $GME. Stop saying "tomorrow is the day." Billionaires are not coming to bail you out. If institutional investors come in, they're waiting for this constant downhill slide to end at where the stock belongs, probably around $20. You can't trigger shit by holding. The HFs will outlast you.
Edit: Screenshots from the worst 40 minutes of my financial life https://imgur.com/a/MlTRJmx
Edit 2: JFC, some of you are takin WSB way too seriously. You should not be using reddit for DD. Also, this is not financial advice. Don't take financial advice from someone who tells you stories about chasing highs at casinos.
Edit 3: This is WSB, my dudes. I'm glad most of you were entertained by my story. For the few of you who got that worked up by a random stranger on the internet telling you that he's a degenerate, you may actually have a problem. https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/

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Bitstarz casino stole 4 bitcoins from around 17000 dollars worth I had no bonus on they make up lies and disable your account if you win I have screenshot s transcripts stay away from them at all cost if u win big they will take everything away from you and then if you complain online they just add
Go1dfish undelete link
unreddit undelete link
Author: Jaminkens

Life long gamer. My favorite game series growing up was Grand theft auto. GTA 3. GTA Vice city. Gta San Andreas were all of my favorite games.
Lets not forget ambitious handheld single player experiences such as "GTA: Liberty City stories" and "GTA: Vice City stories" on the PSP
When GTA 4 was announced. And the trailer dropped I was extremely excited. I would watch every trailer, analyze screenshots. I loved the single player campaign. I also loved the focus on single player content. The Lost and Damned, and the Ballad of Gay Tony were very ambitious DLC content in my opinion. Both tied in to the main plot in a fun way, which was planned from the beginning.
Remember, when you completed Museum Piece in GTA 4, you got the "Impossible trinity" achievement. Trinity as in Niko, Luis, and Johney (that mission was the lone moment that connected GTA IV's main story, and the two single player DLC's)
We even got the ambitious "Chinatown Wars" with the entire map of Liberty City on the Nintendo DS.
I remember being at lunch during high school when the trailer for GTA V dropped. Went to midnight launch for GTA V and got it for the XBOX 360. I also brought the Xbox One version to play it on that gen.
But here we are. What was once my favorite game series has now become a soul less cash grab. Where is the new GTA? New stories? New characters? New area to explore? Modern day Vice city?
I wouldn't even mind a more modern rendition of Liberty City, with a version of Philadelphia in the south, and Atlantic City in the east for casinos etc. 3 cities in 1 map like in San Andreas. That would be pretty cool. GTA: San Andreas consisted of Los Santos (based on Los Angeles), San Fierro (based on San Francisco), and Las Venturas (based on Las Vegas).
Im ashamed of what GTA has become.
Instead you release GTA V AGAIN on the next gen. It will be year 2032 and we will still be getting upgrades upon upgrades on the same game that I played on the 360!...
No GTA game for almost 2 generations of systems. Micro transactions/ Pay to Win/ should not be legal
Edit: to be clear im not buying it. Havent touched it in years
Edit #2: I am talking about the GRAND THEFT AUTO series. Not Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption ONLY exists because of the popularity of GTA.

I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
 
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547
I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T

Intro

• "The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
  • "I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
• "For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
  • "We're spread way too thin."
• "If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
• RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
  • Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
  • ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
  • Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
  • Widespread match fixing
  • The Pandemic
    • "People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
    • "People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
      • "To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
      • "Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
      • "People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
• "It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
  • RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
    • He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.

CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association

"Who does this union really fucking serve?"

• RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
  
  • He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
    • He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
      • He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
    • Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
    • RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
    • Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
      • "and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
• He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
  
  • "We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
  • He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
  • "They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
• He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
  
  • He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
    • He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
  • He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
    • RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
  • "I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
  • "Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
    • "Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
    • "That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
• He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
  
• He also says their rankings are a joke
  
  • "Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
• He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
  
• "Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
  

ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission

"They have been put in an impossible position."

• RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
• "ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
  • "Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
  • "Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
    • Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
      • Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
  • "They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
    • "They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
• ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
  • He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
    • Also says more coaches being banned are coming
    • He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
• ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
  
  • "I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
  • "So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
    • "Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
• RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
  

Stream Sniping

"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"

• RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
  • On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
    • "Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
      • He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
        • He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
        • The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
        • "ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
• He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
• "All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
  • He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?

Match Fixing

"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."

• RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
  • "Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
• "Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
• Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
  • Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
    • They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
      • "I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
        • "Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
• RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
• "There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
  • "It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
• "It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
  • "I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
• He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
• "That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
  • "All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
• "I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."

North America

"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."

• RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
• There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
• He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
  • RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
  • He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
• He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
  • He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
    • They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
    • When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
    • "was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
    • He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
• He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
  • He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
• He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
  • He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
• He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
• He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
  • Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
• RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
• RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."

Talent

"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."

• RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
• He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
• Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
• He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
  • He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
• He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
• He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
• New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
• He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
• He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
• He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."

Valve

"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"

• Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
  • Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
• In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
• RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
• He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
• RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
  • A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
  • RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
  • RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
• RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
• Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
  • They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
• RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
  • Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
• He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
• Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
  • RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
• "It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
  • Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
• "Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
• "People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."

Closing Statements

"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."

• RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
• "We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
• "There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
• "How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
• "Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
• "The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
  • He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
• He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
  • "If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
    • "They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
• He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
• "Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
• "This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
• "You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
  • "Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
• "Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
  • "You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
• "I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
  • "I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
• "I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."

(I'm always testing stuff and so should you!!!)
What is the feeling Neville is talking about when he says to “feel it real”?
Relief, as told in “Wonder Working Power”:

Affirm: "I am possessing it now" and persist until you feel the relief of possession. Then go about your business, knowing that in a way you know not of, you will be led to the fulfillment of what you did within yourself!

And gratitude, as told in “At Your Command”:

Give thanks for it to the point that you are grateful for having already received it – then go about your way in peace.

Why? Relief and gratitude imply acceptance of the wish fulfilled. He talks about this in the “1948 Q&A”:

When I speak of feeling I do not mean emotion, but acceptance of the fact that the desire is fulfilled. Feeling grateful, fulfilled, or thankful, it is easy to say, "Thank You," "Isn't it wonderful!" or "It is finished." When you get into the state of thankfulness, you can either awaken knowing it is done, or fall asleep in the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

And (in the same session), emphasizes that is the only thing you have to do:

You are relieved of that responsibility. You do not have to make it a reality, it already is! Although your concept of self seems so far removed from the venture you now contemplate, it exists now as a reality within you...
The only sacrifice you are called upon to make, is to give up your present concept of self and appropriate the desire you want to express.

Last week discovered that a lot of my internal dialog contains an air of… dissatisfaction with something in my life. I haven’t fully given up my present concept of self in many ways. So I’m going to purposefully fill my head with an immense amount of gratitude in hopes to cut all that out.
Specifically I am:

• Meditating for 45 minutes a day (holiday season makes it hard to find dedicated quiet time lol).
  
• Writing 200-point lists of gratitude a day. (context: this was double my daily goal of 100 per day, so this wasn't as "extreme" to me as it might seem. If you are just starting out, I recommend 10 things. It's hard at first. But it does get easier.)
  
• Have 3 10-minute “gratitude sessions” where I focus on feeling immensely fulfilled and relieved.
  

Since I had done this sort of experiment before (quite a bit ago, before I started posting these publicly), it was nice to compare and contrast my two separate experiments. The moral of the story here is: the more you practice, the easier it becomes.
Focus
If I had some negative thought, I’d meditate on it to dissolve it. But otherwise, being gracious, relieved, and otherwise in a good mood.
Thoughts
If I learned anything this week, it’s that I have changed a lot more than I thought I have.
The meditations felt short (most of my sessions tend to be much longer than 45 minutes, so this makes sense lol). I ended up holding my “extreme gratitude” states for waaaaaaay longer than 10 minutes. The gratitude lists took a bit of time to get used to, but after a few days it wasn’t difficult to find 200 things I liked in a given day.
This was not true the last time I did this two months ago. Everything felt like effort. Shifting states took effort. Being grateful took effort. Meditating took effort. All felt like work. I would eventually get the hang of it, but I had to "earn" it in some way.
But… now it actually is pretty effortless? You could literally walk up to me and say “u/chocolate-trains, be happy” and I could generate that feeling in seconds. Seriously.
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I really didn’t try very hard to do any of the things I set out to do, yet I was more successful than I expected.
So I spent a bit of time thinking about the cumulative effect of all the work that we do mentally. And, dear God, nothing you’ve ever done was wasted, I promise. Even those “failed” attempts taught you powerful lessons about what you are working with internally. And, since all you are doing is manipulating yourself, this self-gained knowledge is so useful.
Even if you know you have some beliefs you don’t like, you’ll eventually figure out ways to navigate around them and move past them. And what states weaken or eliminate them (and, just as important imo, what states don't). Even if those beliefs don’t immediately fade the first time you tackle them, those beliefs can (and will, if you persist) die. And the increased faith overtime makes the whole process happen more quickly (because you hold concepts like “consciousness is the only reality” as more fundamental as anything else you currently know, weakening the strength of those unwanted beliefs). That faith + generally mastering your moods/reactions is what makes magic happen.
That’s why persistence is key. To use the gardening analogy, if you sow enough seeds of plants that you like and continually neglect/cut out the weeds that you don’t, you’ll eventually have a beautiful garden, regardless of how disgusting and overgrown the land was initially. And, even if some weeds resurface they are much faster to cut down, because you are a better gardener with each attempt.
This concept is summed up beautifully in one of his radio lectures:

Sow an imaginary conversation, you reap an act;
Sow an act, you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, you reap a character;
Sow a character, you reap your destiny.

Y’know, a lot of focus is often put on manipulating one’s imaginal conversations/acts to instill good habits that will change one’s destiny. Not a lot of focus is put on how that changes your character imo (at least in Neville's work, I suppose we get plenty of that in the main sub lol). Not only do you get the thing you want, but you become the person who gets that thing. And, if you keep persisting, you eventually become the person who always “happens” to get that thing.
It’s more readily seen in an example. Compare the individual who does SATS to win money at the casino vs. the person who “just so happens to be lucky” all the time and gambles for fun. With more experiences, the individual who has to “work” to enter that “lucky, I-win-all-the-time” state will find themselves in enough situations that demonstrate their loyalty to this state (winning more contests, finding money everywhere, etc.) that they won’t feel the “need” to do SATS anymore. Because they’ve become the person who embodies that “lucky” state. That state has become their resting place and does the work for them.
So, once again, it’s about your self-concept (because it will never not be about your self-concept). I just think the power of your self-concept is understated at times (I'm not talking about the self-esteem aspect of self-concept, but concept of self all beliefs, assumptions, ideas consented to) as a whole, which includes (but is not limited to) self-esteem). Too focused on specific manifestations and not enough on how it impacts you as a whole imo. Not taking a comprehensive view when looking at your beliefs is like an artist who can only draw eyes. There is a reason why Neville describes consciousness as being “the sum total of all of [your] beliefs”. You’d be surprised at just how interwoven all your beliefs are, once you really start examining them. And once you make headway in one area of your life, everything begins to change.
To go back to the previous example, if the person manifesting luck isn't paying attention to the other ways they demonstrate the state of "luck" in their life and/or see SATS at the thing manifesting (and not themselves using a tool to assist in manifesting), then getting to that permanent "yeah, I'm just lucky" state is an uphill battle. But if they successfully plant themselves squarely in the state of being lucky, and they know THEY are the cause of their own luck, then you can imagine how differently they'd see life in general and not just at the casino. Which makes attaining different states (say, relationships) much easier, because they have a helpful belief that they can fall back on (I always find the right partners because I'm so lucky).
Assumptions make up your entire life. All of them, working in tandem, to make what you see before you. So, that's why I take a holistic view when changing assumptions. I give attention to both general and specific beliefs. I hope you can see how useful that is.
It’s one thing to use manifestation to fix problems as they come up. It’s another thing entirely to have such a solid belief system that these problems never come up in the first place. And that state (of things always happening in my favor) is something I’m quite interested in lately. And the results of me continually seeing the world from that perspective are really paying off.
So, yeah. I’ve reaped a whole damn character and it feels so fucking natural to be this way. Isn’t that cool? Lol
(future edit: I got a little preachy here for no particular reason, but the point still stands imo. One of the easiest ways to change a lot of things quickly is to simply change how you view yourself (self-concept) in relation to your world. I 100% also believe that changing your assumptions about other things is necessary, but the most permanent changes I’ve seen in my life have come from building + fortifying my basic “I AM” beliefs.)
Best Manifestations
[I feel like it’s kinda lame to just list off the gifts I got for Christmas, so these are just the conscious manifestations. But it was a good week for gifts, trust me lol]

• Here’s a fun game you can play to test your skills: decide what gift someone will give you (for Christmas, birthday, doesn’t matter). Be specific about the person and the gift. If the person in question asks you what you want, do not tell them what you decided they would bring you. What you tell them doesn’t matter, because you already made your decision. Got a really nice set of headphones, and a rainbow keyboard + mouse set that way.
  
• While I was wrapping gifts, I dropped an Instant Pot lid on my right foot. Left a nice, large bruise on it and couldn’t move for a while (it wasn’t broken, just hurt like hell). I had someone bring me some pain meds while I laid down and started revising. Revised for an hour, then the meds kicked in and I could move around more and just go about my business.
  

I’m fine for the most part. Just slightly sore sometimes, but that’s nothing Ibuprofen can’t handle. Interestingly enough, the bruise on my foot disappeared within hours of my revision. It was a pretty dark bruise too. So that’s cool lol.
(future edit: in my experience pain is hard to revise/ignore if I don’t have the resources to focus my energy on ignoring it. I have done so, but Ibuprofen is easier than that lol)
Best State Changes

• Decreased reliance on the 3D world to determine my mood. On Christmas eve, I set a timer to see how long it would take me to feel 15 minutes of gratitude with no negative thoughts. Well, I only got distracted by negative thoughts three times, about 30 seconds each. I had tried this same thing two months ago (October 25, shortly before I started doing these public diary entries). And I got distracted by negative thoughts twelve times. See the screenshots before and after.

This ability to have control over your mood is incredibly useful. Like, say, when you drop heavy shit on yourself lol. It doesn’t devastate you, so it’s easier to focus on what you want instead.
Final Thoughts
Honest to God, have you ever taken the time to appreciate how far you’ve come? And all the good qualities you’ve nurtured?
Like the courage required to hold belief in the face of contradictions? Or the confidence required to believe in faith as your foundation? How ambitious you become when you have more successful experiences? The persistence, dedication, and tenacity required to keep going back to the state when you falter? Or just one’s increased belief in faith, hope, and love in general?
Or even just taking the time to appreciate how powerful you are?
Every time you lift yourself out of an unwanted state, you have exercised your power. Every time you choose to focus on your imagination instead of what’s around you, you have exercised your power. Every time you do anything that asserts the desired state as fact, you have exercised your power. Attention alone is power. Things wither and die through indifference. They are kept alive through attention.. You are powerful.
Self-celebration is really underrated. And, if you are thinking about doing gratitude lists, that definitely comes in handy. All that rambly shit above is easily 10 different things to be grateful for lol.
(future edit: seriously though, self-appreciation has saved my ass so many times when I’m in a bad mood for no reason. And it’s fun to feel like you’re a good person.)
(and one last final thought, unrelated but important)
When I first started getting into the “gratitude” mindset, some of the things I was happy about would have horrible things happen to them. I didn’t understand why until I watched the language I used when describing my appreciation for these things.
Instead of focusing on the attributes I liked, I focused on how heartbroken I would be if I didn’t have X thing because I liked it that much.
You can imagine how well that went lol.
Be aware of what you are giving attention to (and how you give that attention), as often as possible. That makes making effective changes much easier.

What I am about to say has, in it's basic form of "Tarkov is a bad game" been said many times. I normally wouldn't take the time to state something this obvious but I truly want to like this game which makes it considerably more frustrating as battlestate perpetually fails to do anything about the glaring issues it contains. I am also in the mood to watch fanboys scramble to defend the indefensible and spam "git gud" only further proving my point.
Tarkov is a game which in it's pretentious attempts to be "hardcore" seemingly forgets the rudimentary fact that it is a game. games are, on a fundamental level, supposed to be at least one of two( or three depending on how you look at it) things: fun, challenging (and/or competitive if competition isn't just challenge but pvp). To say that Tarkov is not fun is just beating a dead horse at this point. The game seems to go out of it's way to avoid being fun as the developers appear to have conflated "hardcore" and "not fun". While the rush of exfil-ing with "phat loot" might be perceived as fun by some this is much like saying that winning at a casino is fun. The difference with a casino game is that they are in general designed to have of the previously mentioned categories (fun, challenge, competition) whereas Tarkov fails to be any of the three. A casino game can manage to be fun, sometimes through it's design for some players, but always because what you are playing for is real money which has benefits in society and your life as a whole. This takes casino winnings beyond being just "chips on a table" whereas Tarkov has nothing outside of the perpetual, circular grind. At some point "phat loot" in and of itself is just pixels on a screen when there is no meaningful system that getting the loot is a part of. you get the loot, to sell it, to buy gear, to get the same loot, to buy the same gear onward into infinity with no end goal or grander system in sight.
Challenge (or it's pvp form, competition) is a tricky subject that it seems allot of people have a weak grasp of. For instance the question: "is something impossible challenging?" or "Is impossibility the peak of challenge?". It almost seems logical that something impossible would by it's very nature be extremely challenging but I would say no: once something becomes impossible it ceases to be challenging because challenge implies a correct set of actions that would lead to success and that this set of actions has some level of difficulty to complete. Here we enter the real problem with Tarkov, not being fun wouldn't be such a problem in and of itself if the game were truly challenging or competitive.
What Tarkov really is, when it comes down to it, is a gauntlet, largely comprised of bullshit. You enter a raid and then proceed to try and jump the various hurdles which are put in front of you in order to reach that juicy "phat loot" dopamine hit at the end (which as I have stated, is really just an illusion). There are a considerable number of hurdles in any given raid which would be fine if the game was a functional and correctly tuned system where crossing each of those hurdles is something in control of the player. What makes Tarkov a truly bad game is the number of hurdles which exist that the player has no real agency in jumping. These hurdles resolve to being a probability chance of being impossible. I will get to what these hurdles are in a moment but first another question about challenge:--let's say you have a boss in an old school game, except this boss' mechanics are that you simply run over a series of colored stripes on the ground, the stripes are many different colors and each one has an effect. In order to win you must simply reach the boss by crossing these stripes. The thing is that each stripes' effect is a different probability chance to kill you. there is no correlation between the stripes color and it's chance to kill so you can't try to game the probability in any meaningful way. you simply run to the boss and either get there because none of the random chances to die were rolled or you die and start over--
Is this game challenging? let's ignore how rudimentary and not fun that game would be and instead focus on if that game is challenging. It is possible to win and so as a whole the game is not impossible so surely it isn't the same as the initial example of an impossible game at the beginning of the post. Yet again I would disagree, this game would not actually be challenging because the player doesn't have any recourse to effect the outcome. In order for a game to be challenging there needs to be something to player can do to influence his chances of success.
Me, my good friend and my brother have been playing this game for a couple of years and have accumulated an almost comical amount of screenshots and recordings which demonstrate the same kind of unpredictable and inflexible gameplay hurdles as described in the hypothetical game earlier. These recordings include:
- shooting a complete bambi who didn't have a helmet on, undeniably in the head, with bullets which we can confirm deal more damage than the head has hp by a large margin and proceeding to have that person kill one of us in a single shot with a pistol through our helmeted head.
- obvious hacking.
- seemingly being killed by what felt like a console command while in full cover with no sound of a weapon discharging or being hit by a round
- hearing footsteps while looting, trying to exit the loot menu and it proceeding to lag out long enough for that person to cross a hundred feet and kill one of us before we could even control our character
- shooting someone in the head with SNB, knowing it should pen most helmets, them spinning around and killing one of us, getting to the postgame screen and seeing that none of our damage was absorbed by armor.
- dealing upwards of 150 damage to someone's torso without killing them
-shooting someone multiple times, seeing blood, knowing you hit them, getting one-tapped, going to postgame and seeing that it claims you didn't hit them
- getting shot in the head by someone who clearly had no way of seeing your head
- trying to move into cover and being stopped by some tiny object on the ground which is hardly taller than my character's foot itself
and these are just a small sample of the things and primarily those which seem to be unintentional oversights or bugs. This isn't even to mention the horrid design decisions that lead to meaningless unassailable "hurdles" such as:
- the infamous "rng scav instakill" where scavs seemingly just roll on a table of where they will hit you which leads to being one-tapped by a mindless NPC based on nothing but RNG.
-being queued with teams of 3 as a solo-getting
-10 kills in a match only to die of hunger even though your character has only been in raid for 30 minutes (probably translating to a couple of hours of "game time" which still make no sense to be dying of hunger in)
- getting shot and realizing you forgot your salewa so you have heavy bleeding and nothing to stop it with because the game makes it a pain in the the ass 15 minute process just to put gear on your pmc
- getting shot, having light bleeding and only 2 tourniquets and a hemostat which for some reason magically only work when you're bleeding "heavily"
-the general prevalence of "you shoot at eachother until somebody gets randomly one-shot" which is what most combat breaks down to
what this in effect means is that your choices, gear and ability often have little to no effect on whether or not you survive a raid much of the time. This also means that there's no way to really learn from dying and avoid it next time because there is either no explanation for what occurred or no possible way it could have been avoided. There are likely ways to game some of these bullshit hurdles to work out in your favor but all that means is that someone else is hitting that bullshit hurdle instead of you. This is pre-emptively in response to the incoming "but Pestily survives raids, therefore it is because he is good and therefore the game is not a meaningless soup of rng nonsense". Someone like pestily is extremely skilled at the parts of the game which a player can control but still dies to nonsense on stream all the time. A game is supposed to be made to be played by it's community, not by 10 streamers on twitch and everyone else just watches them play instead.
This has been allot of words to state the obvious fact that "tarkov bad" so I'll end it here. I didn't even get to the analysis of how the game's trajectory seems to have very little chance of ever improving the game in a serious way and may in fact be a downward spiral of adding worthless complexity to the game that only serves to make it less fun in an vain attempt to reach the orgasm part of the "hardcore" circlejerk. I would just like to remind everyone that responding with some flavor of "git gud" only serves to prove my point that this game accomplishes nothing but to feed into a toxic community of "hardcore" players who circlejerk over how "hardcore" they are without ever stopping to question if the game which they think proves their status as "hardcore" actually contains any meaningful difficulty or competition. seemingly either ignorant or uncaring that they are dumping their time into something which has no real value outside of being a gauntlet of coin tosses.

I made a post a few years back about anonymous-casino disabling my account after winning 51 BTC.
I know everyone will comment as to why you would trust an online casino with so much BTC?
But at the time BTC =$1,000 and I bought in with 1 BTC then turned it into 51 BTC in the run of a lifetime. I also have lost tens of thousands on their site.
Also thought I thought they were legit because I cashed out $400 in winnings in Christmas and they said I was one of the lucky few to get a double cash out turning it into $800.
Im really trying to get some solid advice if there is anything I can do, especially since it happened when BTC was $1000.
I reached out to support again seeing maybe if they will forget since they last ignored me, but they enabled my account and disabled it again. But I at least managed to get the screenshots of my bets history proving I won on their site.
What it looks like support is trying to do to me now is that in their policy if you don't access you account in 180 days, they can keep your funds. I couldn't access my account within 180 because they disabled it and I have emails from support on that time period asking for access.
Is it even worth trying to do anything?

This industry has a lack of transparency so I'm more than happy to say I will provide lots of that throughout this post with screenshots. There are LOTS of imgur links to back what I say so it's not just words on a post expecting you to just believe what I'm typing.
This post I suppose is "Part 2" my post back in April, "After 2 years of Daytrading. 7 months full time. Here's my advice". I'm doing this to update everyone who came/comes across this in the future. Yes, it is possible. No, it won't be easy. You will pay homage to the rite of passage into this career. I'll also provide some examples of styles of trading so for the newer aspiring traders, there will be some things I rarely see discussed on forums. So here's to 1 year of Full Time Day Trading
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TL;DR - You'll become desensitized to trading. Stubborn to other strategies (There are biggebaddemore lucrative strategies. Don't chase them. Why fix what's not broken? I know what works for me and I'm content with it. No strategy is better than another. It's a personal choice. ). Losing individual trades won't faze you, they're inevitable. Profiting certainly feels better. After a while, you won't be as enthralled to trade every morning, it'll become just another part of your day). Trading is just managing your money through a statistic and the medium to execute it is trading on your platform. Think: "If. Then. Because". Your trading plan should be that black and white. Ask "Why" for everything you do and use. If you can't answer it with documented results, drop it.
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I get a bunch of messages all the time from people asking - . Out of those who follow me and chat me seeking further tips through my previous posts. I'll be answering the FAQ's and addressing things I see frequently in this sub as far as trading axioms
Disclaimer: I won't sugarcoat anything. I'll share my experiences and add pieces of advice I'd give to those who are currently experiencing the same thing becoming a full time day trader and what day to day life is like, the occasional distress, (DRAWDOWNS). Some of you follow my Twitter for the past few months where I post my daily watchlists with a snippet that reveals my DayTradingBuyingPower. I do this not to brag but to demonstrate that the account does yield growth, I pay myself, and there are days where the balance does not move because there was no edge. I also do this since nobody else shows their account performance. (Yes. You, Mr. YouTube gurus and wannabe gurus).
We do this for income, the numbers on our accounts are real. Treat it as such. Get your initial capital out of your account THEN try to "Scale your account" with your profits AKA The Market's Money.
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I'll go over:
•FAQ's that I get in my inbox (I'm still welcome to further questions if I don't answer here)
•Decision Fatigue (You will experience this)
•The previous year (2019-2020) of ups and downs
•How to use my watchlists that I post on Twitter in the morning to your advantage
•The pivotal moment that changed my trading career (NFLX 10-17-19)
•The road to becoming a full time trader. (It won't be fun unless you're handed the money)
•You'll have a better grasp of my strategy (Between ProTip 4 and 5. ProTip 8.)
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There are 10 "ProTips" throughout the post that I wish I could tell myself years back and I'll periodically throw them in here as the post goes on. I make posts long in order to segregate those serious about this business and those who will just become another statistic in the failure rate of this business.
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At the end of this post, I'll go over the frequent questions I receive such as: (Answers to FAQ at bottom of post.)

1. "How do you prepare for a trading day?"
2. "What would you go back to tell yourself?"
3. "Books?" (The most abused question, but I get it. I could start a public library with just trading books I bought over the years)
4. "What is your background?"
5. "What is a normal day for you?"
6. "How did you discover your strategy?"
7. "What did you do/How did you get started?"
8. "What is your % return?" (Not a fun question since a trading account is not an index or investment account. Intraday traders do not measure performance in %. Most are measured in "R".)
9. "Is enough to start trading?"
10. "Why do you need so many monitors"? (This one is rarely asked but I do see it discussed on platforms and people trading on mobile phones love giving flack to anybody who trades on multiple monitors. Hint: Everyone's different. Whatever works for the individual. There are no rules in trading. The only rule is that it works.)

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My story:

Background:
I heard about daytrading during the 2008 crash while in high school. We all want to make more while working less. I entertained day trading from time to time but always realized I never had enough money. Horrible mindset because I could have still researched WHILE saving money to put into my trading business.
2015 - I opened my first trading account with Scottrade while in the Marines. Apparently if you have a net worth of over $1,000,000 you can get out early (Biggest rumor ever).
I frivolously bought crap penny stocks. In short - I was a hair away from gambling. What made it NOT gambling was the fact that at least I owned something tangible (Securities of a company) and anything can happen. Buy low sell high was my strategy. Didn't work obviously. No idea what I was doing. I'd buy and hold hoping to wake up to the stock price being way higher and it never happened.
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•ProTip #1 : If you hold a trade overnight... It is not daytrading. Stop turning into an investor because you can't admit a minor defeat.
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2017 - I started taking this business seriously while working in the oilfield as a Logistics Planner (If you're wondering what company since I am asked this from time to time, Google: "World's largest oilfield services company").
No kids, girlfriend/wife or financial obligations. I worked 10AM - 7PM CST and would trade the open from home for roughly 1 hour. Later I was offered to be a Data Analyst... Only downside was... I couldn't trade since I had to be at work now at 8AM CST during the market open. In the moment of signing the offer letter, I was bummed thinking, "No more trading,"
That wasn't the case though. You can still build your trading business with a 9-5 and while never making one trade. The data is there.
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•ProTip #2 : We all see the same data. It's there forever. Many strategies show their edge both live and in hindsight the same. (Especially if you trade patterns). You CAN build your business as a trader without even taking a trade. You CAN build your strategy while working a 9-5. Just because you're not trading, does not mean you can't build your business through research. You won't know how you'll react to the losses but at least you can diagnose the raw data with a large enough sample size for assurance and confidence.
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If you have a 9-5 and want to go fulltime into this business. Stay for a bit, save, live so far beneath your means that it is almost miserable, (depending on your expenses, area you live, family etc) and get a few hundred sample sizes of your strategy! And for your PTO/days off... trade the open. I sacrificed my vacation days to trade.
After 2 years in corporate America, eating cheap food, never going out, saving relentlessly, I made the decision to just do it and resigned. I went straight into the ring of fire known as trading. That was on: September 23rd, 2019
"" ^{(Sound familiar?})
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When you hear these types of comments.. your response should be: "Nobody put the time I put into this. The 90%+ who fail, don't have it all written out, computerized backtests, manual backtests, statistics, SOP manuals, JUST like the job I have which is a business, I'm just another cog in their wheel. I'll just be wearing all the hats in my trading business. Instead of Oil&Gas, it's just for trading". One thing I see here a lot is people saying to trade X amount of months/years or make X.
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•ProTip #3 - Think in man hours, not calendar. Example:
Trader A puts in 1 hour of study/work/research everyday for 1 year. (365 Hours)
Trader B puts in 12 hours of work every day for 4 months. (~1,450 Hours)
Trader A lives in a major city while Trader B lives in the middle of nowhere. (Think cost of living)
2 totally different living expenses and 2 different calibers of dedication. I'd put my money on Trader B because he put in more man hours. (~1,000 more hours on the clock to be more exact).
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ProTip #4 - Have a cushion in your account AND your personal bank account. Having a strategy is great but you won't know entirely if you can fulfill and execute your plan until you experience the ups and downs both short and long term. A strategy is constant over long periods of time... there will be days, weeks, and perhaps a month here and there where you aren't making much money. We hear all the time, "Trade like a casino". Casinos don't make money day after day but the odds are in there favor over the long haul.
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Month 1 of full time trading was great:
Immediately after going full time, the first month (September 2019 to October 2019), I did super well. Business as usual. No stress. Everything going as planned. No turbulence. At least not like I had ever experienced...
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The 2 prerequisites I had before resigning was:

1. Show consistency in returns. Consistent Sharpe Ratio.
2. Make a 4 figure trade (I achieved this while short 100 shares on ROKU September 20th, 2019 and even made a victory post if you scroll down my profile's posts.)

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First life-changing trading lesson learned as a full time trader:
That money printing spree ended on NFLX October 17th, 2019. Less than 1 month of being a full time trader. Deviating and going against my plan I actually made $500 in a matter of 4 minutes. If you follow my watchlists on Twitter, I always trade with the direction of the gap. If I notate, "Long Watches" that means I will only trade it IF (and only IF) I see a long biased pattern. Likewise I will only be looking to short my "Short Watches". Plenty of times I'll call out a ticker and it immediately goes the other way. No harm no foul because there was no long biased pattern to confirm my thesis.
On 10-17-2019, I went against my plan and it worked.. NFLX gapped up to resistance and I went short when it tanked off of a short pattern.(This is known as fading). The market gave me a free lunch and then some. So now I'm walking on air in my mind:
"I'm an absolute unit"
"I'll do it again and clear another $500 to make it a 4 figure day before 9:30AM Central"
"Should have quit my job way earlier being this good."
Within 30 minutes of the open. I gave all $500 back. Yes I wanted to trade it back. Never have I had the desire to smash anything but I do understand those who do! Yes I stood there and felt like each passing second was wasted opportunity. The next 24 hours were long!
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ProTip #5: It's circumstances like that that help you in the long run. FunFact: I never once deviated from my plan since. Not ever again.
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"I could have paid for my groceries and electric for the month after 4 minutes of trading if I just took the free pass the market gave me" I felt dumb but in hindsight, I'm glad at what happened. It was this exact instance that married me to my strategy/business plan. The next day and the 7 trading days following. I didn't make 1 profiting trade. My longest ever drawdown - 11 straight trades. While researching I found out this was Decision Fatigue (I'll go over this shortly below)
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Put yourself in that situation...
You have bills and your income is strictly trading. I don't care how much a robot you think you are or how strongly you believe in probabilities, when you were in an office less than a month ago making almost 6 figures sitting in an air conditioned office knowing direct deposit is on its way every other Friday no matter how well or poorly you performed at work.. Now you're in the hot seat. Its a bottomless feeling. Now all of your friends and families words are ringing in your head.
But just like a boxing match.. you gotta take a hit to get a hit. Win some, lose some, shake hands and get back to normal life. Water under the bridge.
Mind you:
•No guaranteed direct deposit every 2 weeks.
•No more medical/dental insurance.
•401K retirement is no longer being matched.
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11 trades is nothing. You only require ~5.5 trades at 2:1RRR to make it back OR 3.5 trades at 3:1RRR. It's nothing especially in your research because you can easily just scroll a little more and see, "Oh that's just a drawdown. No big deal". How will you react in real time? Will you buckle or choke? But the thing is, I was skipping trades out of fear and JUST so happened to be picking all of the unsuccessful ones. (Decision Fatigue)
Think about those 2 weeks of being in a drawdown. Half of the month. You're not just stagnant, your account is bleeding slowly but surely. Next time you're looking at your spreadsheet/backtest/predictive model/research.. try to put yourself in those days of drawdown. It's not just 11 boxes of red with "-1R" or "Loss" in them. The screenshot above on Imgur is just a recent example.
Think about your daily routine, going to the gym, hanging with friends, grocery shopping, cooking, going to bed, waking up, doing a routine, then losing again.. and again.. and again. Try to think of life during those 300+ hours (Weekends too) of, "I haven't made money. I've lost money. And I still have bills. After paying them, I'll be closer to my set Risk of Ruin".
Here's a lesson you won't learn before going fulltime but I'll do my best to emphasize it here:
Pick a strategy. And stick with it. It can literally be anything. Don't spread yourself thin watching 20+ tickers and be a jack of all patterns/tickers. Be a master of 1 pattern and master of 1 circumstance. There's this real thing called "Decision Fatigue" which explains exactly why what happened.. happened. The article explains that the 2 outcomes of this mental strain known as "Decision Fatigue" is:

1. Risky Decision-Making
2. Decision Avoidance

Sound familiar? Does it kind of make sense now? As a new trader you have YouTube, Facebook, StockTwits, Twitter, "gurus", books recommended on Amazon, all throwing their ideas/strategies around, the market has opportunities littered all over.. Decision Fatigue is inevitable for the unprepared. Decision Fatigue happens in every profession. If you mess up at your 9-5, its just a blunder, your paycheck will remain the same. Just a slap on the wrist and move on. With trading, you make a mistake.. it's less food on your table, lights don't stay on, and/or water isn't running. That pressure adds up. No wonder so many fail...
The signs of Decision Fatigue:
•Procrastination.
•Impulsivity.
•Avoidance.
•Indecision.
When you find what clicks with you AND its either statistically or performance proven, have the courage to risk a healthy sum of your capital into it. There are strategies/patterns/styles of trading littered all over the internet:
Very broad example:
"IF circumstance happens THEN "Execution". Stoploss is XYZ. Target is XYZ. BECAUSE over a series of Y trades, I will make $X,XXX.xx".
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ProTip #6 : Strategies are all over the internet. It's your account/money, backtest it. People share their strategies here all the time and although I don't agree with them because I know what works for me, it's something to chew off of for you newer traders. YouTube is a harbor with people who give just enough info to figure their style out. You will lose trades. Sit for some screen-time and pay homage to the edge that you discover. All in due time.
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Insert key metrics and find correlations. This is how you create checks and balances to create/formulate a black and white trading plan. When I first started doing this, my spreadsheet(s) had so many columns it was annoying and would kill my desire to continue working. You'll find things that are imperative and some that are unimportant. For a lack of more colorful terms: "Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" Trim the fat. Rinse and repeat.
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Here's some things I used to remind myself of and perhaps it'll ring some bells for you:

•Surrender your capital to your edge. If you truly accept the risk and trust your proven edge, losses don't feel like anything nor do profits. Although we're not here to put on losing trades and yes it does feel nice to profit. I still from time to time will excited when I hit target after a series of multiple profiting trades depending on my mood.
•If you're nervous or your heart starts beating quicker when you hear the sound effect of a trade getting entered/filled. Be honest with yourself and ask yourself if you're truly accepting the risk.
•Things you can't take to the bank:

1. RRR.
2. Win-Rate
3. Number of trades.
4. "This one great trade that I hit target in less than 30 seconds and I got filled better than expected"

All of these are integral metrics. But you're trading to make money. It's up or down, green or red, profit or loss, TRUE or FALSE. So with that said, find what works flawlessly and is easy to follow. Checks and Balances. Then allocate a good sum of risk into it. I read it here all the time, "Don't risk too much" and that's great and true for new traders. But don't sell yourself short. Push yourself over the edge and admit that you know your stuff. Think of Trader A and Trader B. If you've put the time in.. don't sell yourself short. You've built enough courage to learn a business so many fail at. This business has such a negative connotation. But remember that not everybody can handle meritocracies and that's exactly what the market is. Don't try to be the best, just work harder than everyone else and the output of your input will be relative.
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ProTip #7: YouTube trading ads from gurus... they're subconsciously making you think you're a novice trader. It's in their marketing. They study marketing psychology. The EASIEST things to sell:

1. Health
2. Wealth
3. Happiness

People that are desperate for those things are the most vulnerable and these "Traders" marketers are fantastic at portraying all 3 of those things at once.
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•ProTip #8 (Broken record alert) : Write a business plan. Your strategy shouldn't take longer than 4 sentences to explain to another trader. When you have a plan that's proven through a statistic and WAIT for it to happen, you feel 100X better taking the trade. You don't even care too much when it results in a loss. Because that was your plan, you accept it much better, and you know it was just an expense for a winning trade.
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Want my strategy? "I scan for stocks with a market cap of over 250M, 10k shares premarket, gapping to support or resistance, priced over $10, and I look for a pattern biased to the direction of the overnight gap. It isn't rocket science. Check my Twitter, look at the dates I posted, and you'll notice the gist. Yes this is an edge but not the entire edge. How fast can you sift through 15 time frames? How long does it take you to fill out your order ticket? Your Fibonacci time extensions with 5 EMA's and Bollinger Bands aren't helping you. They're lagging. If they work for you, great. In my experience, they hindered my visibility.
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Pro Tip #9: Yes statistics are highly applicable to trading. Patterns do work. All patterns do is tell you WHEN to enteexit, and how many shares. Humans will never think differently of money. Be the frontrunner of the market's emotions. Nobody remembers the indecisive leader. Risk taking is a commonality amongst leaders. Trading requires courage and it's O.K. to show a bit of confidence as long as you also have the humility to admit when you're in a bad trade. (Notice how I didn't put, "wrong". You're only "wrong" when you deviate from a proven strategy.)
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ProTip #10: Risk management is 24/7. I've never heard anyone mention this but think about it a little bit. Having financial obligations can become stressful regardless of how you earn your income but its far more stressful while running a business. Not just any business, but a business where you can go to work on your A-game, do every single last thing right, trade without emotion etc... and still walk away with less money than what you came to work with. Meanwhile somebody who JUST started trading made a 4 figure profit not knowing what the heck the difference between ETB, HTB, or NTB. Think of it like this, a JV high school baseball player can hit a homerun off of an MLB pitcher once.. but how will he fare at the end of the season? Traders don't predict stock prices, traders predict the outcome over hundreds of trades. People chat me asking what TO do rather than what NOT to do. You don't learn labor intensive jobs or how to fly a plane by what to do.. you learn what NOT to do to stay alive.
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That's all I have. Once you have a trading plan underway and you're executing it, you don't have much time when your hobbies are cheap but I still do respond to chats/messages. I do get asked from a previous post when I'll build a website and to answer that: I'm learning how to build a site on rainy days. Can't put a definitive date on it. I will say that its coming, if you don't give up on this business in the next year or so, you'll see it. What I plan on putting on there:

1. RiskReward Calculators
2. Position size Calculators
3. EV Calculator
4. Dictionary with examples

I just don't want some generic WordPress site. I want my website to be stellar and a great resource for aspiring traders. Something I didn't have learning this business. I want it to be something I'd consider a staple in a trader's resources. Perhaps one day it will be referenced on this sub frequently.
FAQ:

1. "How do you prepare for a trading day?" I get behind the computer about 20 minutes before the bell. Reason being: "If you study long. You'll study wrong". If the chart isn't grabbing my attention and gets me excited, then I flick to the next ticker. I don't even know the companies I trade half the time nor do I care about a news report some journalist wrote. Also there is no magic news outlet that lets you know about "Major events that affect stock prices". If there was, I wouldn't be here because we're all subscribed to the same edge nor would I be trading my style.
2. "What would you go back to tell yourself?" Get more data. Save a little more, your hairline and sleep schedule will thank you. Take only perfect trades and don't feel forced to trade. There will be days you don't touch an order ticket. And days where you are busy and have tunnel vision. Next thing you know its time to shut it down for the day.
3. "Books?" - I try to humble myself when answering this but off the cuff, they're all mediocre. Andrew Aziz's was ok, definitely get it, it's only a few bucks on Kindle. Just don't expect it to give you strategies BUT it will give you ideas. If you're brand new, it is good as it will teach you the common vernacular of a day trader. Mark Douglas was interesting but his YouTube seminar recordings are much better. No book, Facebook group, YouTube channel is going to be the end all be all perfect strategy. Expect losses. Don't be a one hitter quitter after suffering a few tiny losses/paper cuts. Stick to it. Most books will help you familiarize yourself with the common vocabulary amongst traders and will hint ideas. It's your job to formulate the strategy and template for research.
4. "What is your background?" I was a logistics planner for a major oilfield services company. Later I then became a data/buyer analyst so yes, data analytics/research was a 2nd language for me entering trading. I did have that upper hand and did shave off months if not years for me.
5. "What is a normal day for you?" I'm always done trading after 10:30AM Central. I will hold onto a trade until right before the bell if it hasn't hit either target or StopLoss by the time I leave the house but it is absolutely closed in entirety by 2:55PM Central. After I trade, I enjoy the day. No I'm not riding around in my Lambos posting IG/Snapchat (I have neither) stories of my profits with my private jet waiting on a runway trying to sell an $7 eBook or a $100 membership (HINT HINT). I grill/cook, read, workout, ride my motorcycle, attack my other sources of income (small businesses I'm building), hit the driving range, shoot guns, etc. I live in Texas. Life is cheap and fun here.
6. "How did you discover your strategy?" I bought TradeIdeas premium, went through all of their computerized backtesting patterns, tested them. Then did what I mentioned earlier... Tried to find correlations in metrics. It distilled the trades to a strict criteria and here I am. I post on average 4-5 tickers on my watchlist. 7 max. I do not like spreading my attention thin across multiple tickers. I do not recommend buying TradeIdeas, it does have lots of bugs.
7. "What did you do/How did you get started?" Was a data analyst, was good at research and applied it to trading. My incentive was, "I could have made more money trading rather than sitting in 2+ hours of roundtrip traffic and 9 hours in an office. The data is there. Everybody sees the same charts all over the world. There are ways to make this possible"
8. "What is your % return?" (Not a fun question since a trading account is not an index or investment account. Intraday traders do not measure performance in %) I trade to make money AND pay myself, so my equity curve will look like a small loss or small gain after I pay myself. % return? I measure my account's performance in Sharpe Ratio and Risk Units. My Sharpe Ratio is ~1.85. While I yield roughly .8 - 1 R per trading day. Some weeks I make 10R. Some weeks I lose 2R. Yeah one week I might make $2,500. But the next week I might lose $300. The following week my strategy will yield $0 and the last week I might make $1,000. Some weeks suck. Some weeks are great. But overall. Just shy of 1R per trading day. Some days I'm super busy taking trade after trade. Some days I'll shut it down after 5 minutes without even filling out an order ticket. Some days I won't even see the open because there is no edge for me.. Keywords... "For me".
9. "Is enough to start trading?" Depends on where you live. Are you restricted to PDT? If not then how much are you obligated to expenses? I live in Texas. Things are cheap here. If you live in NYC or The Bay Area your expenses will be astronomical compared to mine. A $30,000 account is totally doable for a single Texan with low monthly expenses. Now if you're in California or New York? I'm sure you'll fall below 25k if you have 1 bad month. Also depends on if you have other sources of income or a full/part time job. I encourage every trader and aspiring trader to have multiple sources of income, don't rely solely on trading. Not just for the sake of mitigating pressure but also for sanity. If you have a family to provide for, I don't know what that's like, you never know when Little Johnny is going to randomly pick up Trombone lessons for a school program/play while little Suzie needs transmission work in her car because a simple solenoid went out. $1,700 later.
10. "Why do you need so many monitors?" I use 3 for trading. The 4th is for music. The other 2 are useless while trading. That's for trading though. When I made the decision to go full time, I knew I was about to go off the chain with research. And sifting between spreadsheets, a platform to see multiple timeframes for a pattern to backtest. My attention span is short, I'll lose my train of thought before I open the other tab to input data. But the main reason was for research. It's such a time saver and is a headache repellant when doing research while everything is laid out in front of you. Now that I have a system. I'll most likely be treating myself to 2 ultrawides for Christmas.

As always, thank you to everybody who takes time out to message me and letting me know some people read these and show appreciation. I would say, "Good luck" but there is no luck in trading. Just statistics. Remember that!
In conclusion: Yes. Full time trading is possible, depending where you live/monthly expenses and obligations. You're more likely to become a profitable trader than a professional athlete. There is a level of uncertainty each day, perhaps each week, doubtful each month, and definitely not each year. If I ever want a raise, I just consult my business plan and financials, then decide if I can handle it mentally. If you have medical issues, get a part time job for the benefits. If you're healthy, just be careful.
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All the best!
-CJT2013

Focus
If I had some negative thought, I’d meditate on it to dissolve it. But otherwise, being gracious, relieved, and otherwise in a good mood.
Thoughts
If I learned anything this week, it’s that I have changed a lot more than I thought I have.
The meditations felt short (most of my sessions tend to be much longer than 45 minutes, so this makes sense lol). I ended up holding my “extreme gratitude” states for waaaaaaay longer than 10 minutes. The gratitude lists took a bit of time to get used to, but after a few days it wasn’t difficult to find 200 things I liked in a given day.
This was not true the last time I did this two months ago. Everything felt like effort. Shifting states took effort. Being grateful took effort. Meditating took effort. All felt like work. I would eventually get the hang of it, but I had to "earn" it in some way.
But… now it actually is pretty effortless? You could literally walk up to me and say “u/chocolate-trains, be happy” and I could generate that feeling in seconds. Seriously.
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I really didn’t try very hard to do any of the things I set out to do, yet I was more successful than I expected.
So I spent a bit of time thinking about the cumulative effect of all the work that we do mentally. And, dear God, nothing you’ve ever done was wasted, I promise. Even those “failed” attempts taught you powerful lessons about what you are working with internally. And, since all you are doing is manipulating yourself, this self-gained knowledge is so useful.
Even if you know you have some beliefs you don’t like, you’ll eventually figure out ways to navigate around them and move past them. And what states weaken or eliminate them (and, just as important imo, what states don't). Even if those beliefs don’t immediately fade the first time you tackle them, those beliefs can (and will, if you persist) die. And the increased faith overtime makes the whole process happen more quickly (because you hold concepts like “consciousness is the only reality” as more fundamental as anything else you currently know, weakening the strength of those unwanted beliefs). That faith + generally mastering your moods/reactions is what makes magic happen.
That’s why persistence is key. To use the gardening analogy, if you sow enough seeds of plants that you like and continually neglect/cut out the weeds that you don’t, you’ll eventually have a beautiful garden, regardless of how disgusting and overgrown the land was initially. And, even if some weeds resurface they are much faster to cut down, because you are a better gardener with each attempt.
This concept is summed up beautifully in one of his radio lectures:

Sow an imaginary conversation, you reap an act;
Sow an act, you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, you reap a character;
Sow a character, you reap your destiny.

Y’know, a lot of focus is often put on manipulating one’s imaginal conversations/acts to instill good habits that will change one’s destiny. Not a lot of focus is put on how that changes your character imo (at least in Neville's work, I suppose we get plenty of that in the main sub lol). Not only do you get the thing you want, but you become the person who gets that thing. And, if you keep persisting, you eventually become the person who always “happens” to get that thing.
It’s more readily seen in an example. Compare the individual who does SATS to win money at the casino vs. the person who “just so happens to be lucky” all the time and gambles for fun. With more experiences, the individual who has to “work” to enter that “lucky, I-win-all-the-time” state will find themselves in enough situations that demonstrate their loyalty to this state (winning more contests, finding money everywhere, etc.) that they won’t feel the “need” to do SATS anymore. Because they’ve become the person who embodies that “lucky” state. That state has become their resting place and does the work for them.
So, once again, it’s about your self-concept (because it will never not be about your self-concept). I just think the power of your self-concept is understated at times (I'm not talking about the self-esteem aspect of self-concept, but concept of self all beliefs, assumptions, ideas consented to) as a whole, which includes (but is not limited to) self-esteem). Too focused on specific manifestations and not enough on how it impacts you as a whole imo. Not taking a comprehensive view when looking at your beliefs is like an artist who can only draw eyes. There is a reason why Neville describes consciousness as being “the sum total of all of [your] beliefs”. You’d be surprised at just how interwoven all your beliefs are, once you really start examining them. And once you make headway in one area of your life, everything begins to change.
To go back to the previous example, if the person manifesting luck isn't paying attention to the other ways they demonstrate the state of "luck" in their life and/or see SATS at the thing manifesting (and not themselves using a tool to assist in manifesting), then getting to that permanent "yeah, I'm just lucky" state is an uphill battle. But if they successfully plant themselves squarely in the state of being lucky, and they know THEY are the cause of their own luck, then you can imagine how differently they'd see life in general and not just at the casino. Which makes attaining different states (say, relationships) much easier, because they have a helpful belief that they can fall back on (I always find the right partners because I'm so lucky).
Assumptions make up your entire life. All of them, working in tandem, to make what you see before you. So, that's why I take a holistic view when changing assumptions. I give attention to both general and specific beliefs. I hope you can see how useful that is.
It’s one thing to use manifestation to fix problems as they come up. It’s another thing entirely to have such a solid belief system that these problems never come up in the first place. And that state (of things always happening in my favor) is something I’m quite interested in lately. And the results of me continually seeing the world from that perspective are really paying off.
So, yeah. I’ve reaped a whole damn character and it feels so fucking natural to be this way. Isn’t that cool? lol
Best Manifestations
[I feel like it’s kinda lame to just list off the gifts I got for Christmas, so these are just the conscious manifestations. But it was a good week for gifts, trust me lol]

• Here’s a fun game you can play to test your skills: decide what gift someone will give you (for Christmas, birthday, doesn’t matter). Be specific about the person and the gift. If the person in question asks you what you want, do not tell them what you decided they would bring you. What you tell them doesn’t matter, because you already made your decision. Got a really nice set of headphones, and a rainbow keyboard + mouse set that way.
  
• While I was wrapping gifts, I dropped an Instant Pot lid on my right foot. Left a nice, large bruise on it and couldn’t move for a while (it wasn’t broken, just hurt like hell). I had someone bring me some pain meds while I laid down and started revising. Revised for an hour, then the meds kicked in and I could move around more and just go about my business.
  

I’m fine for the most part. Just slightly sore sometimes, but that’s nothing Ibuprofen can’t handle. Interestingly enough, the bruise on my foot disappeared within hours of my revision. It was a pretty dark bruise too. So that’s cool lol.
Best State Changes

• Decreased reliance on the 3D world to determine my mood. On Christmas eve, I set a timer to see how long it would take me to feel 15 minutes of gratitude with no negative thoughts. Well, I only got distracted by negative thoughts three times, about 30 seconds each. I had tried this same thing two months ago (October 25, shortly before I started doing these public diary entries). And I got distracted by negative thoughts twelve times. See the screenshots before and after.

This ability to have control over your mood is incredibly useful. Like, say, when you drop heavy shit on yourself lol. It doesn’t devastate you, so it’s easier to focus on what you want instead.
Final Thoughts
Honest to God, have you ever taken the time to appreciate how far you’ve come? And all the good qualities you’ve nurtured?
Like the courage required to hold belief in the face of contradictions? Or the confidence required to believe in faith as your foundation? How ambitious you become when you have more successful experiences? The persistence, dedication, and tenacity required to keep going back to the state when you falter? Or just one’s increased belief in faith, hope, and love in general?
Or even just taking the time to appreciate how powerful you are?
Every time you lift yourself out of an unwanted state, you have exercised your power. Every time you choose to focus on your imagination instead of what’s around you, you have exercised your power. Every time you do anything that asserts the desired state as fact, you have exercised your power. Attention alone is power. Things wither and die through indifference. They are kept alive through attention.. You are powerful.
Self-celebration is really underrated. And, if you are thinking about doing gratitude lists, that definitely comes in handy. All that rambly shit above is easily 10 different things to be grateful for lol.
(and one last final thought, unrelated but important)
When I first started getting into the “gratitude” mindset, some of the things I was happy about would have horrible things happen to them. I didn’t understand why until I watched the language I used when describing my appreciation for these things.
Instead of focusing on the attributes I liked, I focused on how heartbroken I would be if I didn’t have X thing because I liked it that much.
You can imagine how well that went lol.
Be aware of what you are giving attention to (and how you give that attention), as often as possible. That makes making effective changes much easier.

How to spot the good from the bad ones. I'm sure most of us have been searching endlessly for a reliable Casino that really looks after their customers. So have I and I can easily say it's not an easy task to make heads or tails from. I'm sure you have been searching for different sites and reading reviews about casinos. And still, it's hard to decide where to try your luck.
From my personal experience both as a player and a gambler, there are a few key things I have learned to look out for when I decide if I'm going to spend my hard-earned cash on a site. First of all, check if the casino holds a valid license, The ones to look out for are UKGC and MGA licenses. If they have both you are already one step closer to finding a reliable operator. Secondly, check for some reviews on how long they take to pay out a withdrawal, keep in mind a casino is not a bank and they do take a while to process a payment. Usually, it will take between 1 to 3 days. And that is pretty standard in the industry.
The key thing to look out for here is, that when you sign up, to get your account verified right away as this will prolong any withdrawal you may request at some point. I have seen that many complain about long processing times for withdrawals.
9 times out of 10 its because of 2 things. The documents have not been submitted or wrong documents have been sent in for review.
Here is a top tip to keep in mind when you do decide to sign up and play.

1. Make sure you have a valid ID. So you can take a photo of it. The whole ID has to show in the photo.
   
2. Have a recent official letter or Utility bill no older than 3 months to verify your address. The whole letter has to be visible in the picture in order for it to be accepted.
   
3. Only use 1 deposit method that you can easily verify. Such as a Bank card or E-Wallet. As you will just have to take pictures of the Card and for the E-Wallet, you need a screenshot of your E-Wallet account.
   

Once you have this and you have decided to sign up on a casino of your choice, send the documents in and get the verification done. Saves you a big headache later on. Before you ask why you have to do this. The reason is simple. The casino operates with a license and a part of the legal requirements is to verify each player, it's that simple.
Now for the more fun part. Casinos offer a variety of bonuses, right of the bat when you sign up you will get a welcome offer with your first deposit if you want it. Please make sure to read the bonus terms on any bonus you might take as there is no such thing as a free lunch. Should you take a bonus with your deposit or free spins there are always terms and conditions you need to follow. The most prominent ones are wagering requirements and maximum bet allowed. These 2 points can vary a lot between casinos and you should always check what they are before you decide whether or not to take a bonus.
For example, Casino A offers you a deposit match bonus of 100% up to 200 Cad, Euro, USD etc.
In the bonus terms, the wagering requirement is given and for this example, let's say it is 50X.
What does this mean? It is very simple to understand. Let's say you want to use the deposit bonus and you decide to deposit 100 Cad, Euro, USD etc. The casino will then match your deposit and give you an additional 100 as bonus money. This amount comes with the wagering requirement. So in order to complete the wagering make a simple calculation. 100*50 = 5000. This means that the 100 you got in bonus must be played until you have turned over 5000 Cad, Euro, USD etc. Should you complete the wagering and you still have funds left once completed, then the remaining money is yours and you can place a withdrawal. Also, keep in mind the second point I mentioned earlier. When you play with bonus funds you are restricted to a max bet per spin. This is usually 5 Cad, Euro, Usd etc. If you bet higher you breach the terms and any winnings will most likely be taken away from you. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Now a more decent wagering requirement is usually 35X and most casinos have this in their terms. Any higher and the wagering becomes almost impossible to complete.
One other thing to keep in mind is that some casinos offer sticky bonuses and some don't. The difference here is like night and day. If you get a sticky bonus it means that all funds turn to bonus money at the start when you take a bonus with your deposit and the funds stay that way until the wagering has been completed or you run out of funds. The non-sticky bonuses are the ones you should look out for. Then your money and the bonus money stay in separate pots and you play your real money first.
I hope this will aid you in deciding where to sign up if you are looking for a good casino, and I will list 3 of my personal favourites below with signup links as well for your convenience.
Captain Spins. https://media.dreamteamaffiliates.com/redirect.aspx?pid=4768&lpid=16&bid=1676
CasiGo. https://media.dreamteamaffiliates.com/redirect.aspx?pid=4769&lpid=27&bid=1779
Jonny Jackpot. https://media.dreamteamaffiliates.com/redirect.aspx?pid=4758&lpid=11&bid=1655
Unfortunately, if you reside in the US you can not sign up. But If you are from Canada or Europe feel free to give them a try.
They have amazing bonuses, customer support and their VIP program are one of the best. You won't be disappointed.

A lot of people do it wrong, yeah. There is a system to everything and that includes finance. Including placing a bet, here is a recent winning of mine on popular casino blockchain Earnbet.
https://i.postimg.cc/sfqB2sdg/Screenshot-20210118-222140-Slack.jpg
I plan to move into the Wink Space for sometime but right now I'm tryna take advantage of the TRX reward program
My safe target before the end of year: 1 BTC

$3k XRP reward for top player in the Earnbet weekly reward. $50 BTC bonus for all new players.
That's outside the weekly incentive program for the top casino dApp users!!
My game plays and winnings https://i.postimg.cc/sfqB2sdg/Screenshot-20210118-222140-Slack.jpg
I'm planning to get even more lucky this week!

So recently my account was restricted on 888Casino and they required some ID documents... Fair enough, sent over my provisional. Waited 3-4 days and now my account is unlocked. I then receive an email stating:
"Dear [REDACTED],
This is the Operations Team at 888casino and we are contacting you with regards to your account with username [REDACTED]
Thank you for sending in the recently requested documents which have now successfully passed our verification process. As a result any restrictions which may have been imposed on your account have been removed.
Furthermore we’ve noticed certain patterns in your gaming activity that alerted us to behaviour that is inconsistent with our philosophy of rewarding members for their loyalty and patronage.
This activity may include any of the following, but are not limited to; repeatedly depositing during promotional events to maximise the bonus amount in play on your account, deposits followed by withdrawals once the bonus is awarded, participating in slot races almost exclusively with bonus money and other signs of taking advantage of our offers, rewards, and bonuses.
At this time, we have taken the decision to remove the option of receiving any bonuses on your account for the foreseeable future. You are welcome to continue using your account to enjoy other aspects of our gaming experience.
Please note that you are not eligible for Casino Race bonuses as well as all other bonuses."
​
The funniest part is this, I have not won anything so to speak. There is nothing to withdraw, they gained £40 from me when I put that in my account to play around with. I created my account last week after seeing some livecasino blackjack games and thought it would be fun to try. I got a bonus from signing up which granted me up to 100% of whatever I deposit to a maximum of £100 I believe.
During my blackjack games I pretty much lost my £40 and had the bonus money to play around with. The most I had made it up to was £700 but I was unable to withdraw as money won from bonuses have to be WON up to at least 30x the amount of the bonus. So essentially 1.2k minimum.
I have lost all of that from playing (oh well it was fun) and ever since that happened they have now restricted me from receiving bonuses. That is the only bonus I have received and used since my account has been active. This is my first time gambling on any website and blackjack seemed the easiest so I stuck with that.
888Casino, fuck off... You gained £40 from me and I have not won anything or been able to withdraw anything from you. Why essentially ban me from a small portion of your website which I have not misused. You gave me the offer and I played normally... I have not done anything you have stated. Such bullshit man, I wanted to play for fun and I did just that.
If anyone has any doubts I can literally show my gaming history in FULL. Gonna be a hell of a lot of screenshots, I essentially started on the 21st of this month with a couple slot games which then moved on to BJ for the rest of my time, I stayed with that and played how anyone would play by using the Basic Strategy WHICH 888 THEMSELVES RECOMMEND. Royally fuck your services truly. I would understand your very sad frustration if I had withdrawn any winnings from your platform but I gained nothing from you except a "fuck you nemesiii for giving us money now we're going to restrict you"
Suck, your mum.