Well I was meaning to do this since Feb 23rd when I reported the
Good but have been so busy with everything and then "Ivy" came along that being back in work today for 1 day is the first chance I have had to sit and write so will wrap up the
Bad and Ugly in one go.
BAD & UGLYBasically since November last year I have been on the worst run of sports betting and other people selections for a good 4-5 years and cutting a very long story short I ironed out the best part of £28'000 in a 4 month period through a combination of losing flips (when I say losing flips I mean most of my sports betting is done on flips), interest and through being a bok on some well respected punters selections that I follow plus the general life expenses where we had a lean time towards the end of last year.
In the middle of February I took the decision to tell Petra and put some measures of control back into my life as I didnt want to go down the rocky road that I have trod before so having access to large amounts of money enabling me to try and punt my way out of trouble was never going to be a good thing and I sat her down one evening after we had put Max to bed to go through it with her.
It's pretty hard to explain to someone who you love and also who has a massive amount of value for money that you have lost that amount of money over such a short period of time but luckily she does understand Variance and also knows the kind of bets that I would make so knows that whilst not impossible you have to be pretty unlucky to call the flip of coin wrong 20 odd times in a row especially as its not just like I decided "heads or tails" without putting an element of research into it. 3 Hours later and we were still discussing it and what measures of control she wanted to ensure that we didnt fall any deeper and agreed that it was going to be impossible for me not to have a decent bet every now and again if I like something and also that poker is classified as different to gambling which she grasped anyway so gone are the days of trying to spin up large amounts of money and it's small ball ftw from here.
You may even see me in the BSWOTN thread
So some "Eso Austerity" measures were put in place and fortunately within 6-9 months I will have basically replaced the money I degenned away but it will mean that I play poker once or max twice a month live if something dece is on Al'a April with the deepstack followed by the Monte Carlo and also will sell %'s where needed to balance the books further.
I'm not proud of the losses I made and it obviously didnt come at an ideal time with the baby due within 2 weeks of me telling Petra plus at a time when I was putting together a business plan that would have meant us having to take a really big risk to try and make it work and on that side it has meant that we have to shelve the plans for now although not due to this entirely as it seems the project would have come a bit soon and if the guy who has the premises we want to do this has sorted out his differences with the local council on a couple of aspects on the premises then it might work in our favour.
So a pretty big Sigh all over on that side and it was a very tough conversation that was had with Petra but one that needed to be had as I was starting to spiral out of control and didnt want to put us at risk any further with all the great strides we had made over the past 6years by tredding the same path I did in my 20's. Luckily she really does get the numbers game and when I went through with her some of the things that happened with selections (no excuse but things completely out of your control) she actually understood the very very fine line between turning a loss and a profit.
Well that's the Bad covered and the next few days were a bit tense but we really worked hard through the figures and she knew that whilst it is a lot of money it's not one that changes the life that we have or anything going forward it's simply a waste of ££ plus the added utility of what we would have been able to do with it and the fact that having recouped it in a few months we could theoretically had double.
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