2018 was a brutal year outside of racing.
Racing was not 'great' per se (6%ROI before rebates), but I started the year betting very small and scarce, and was not embracing the game.
Instead of saying "this is what your daddy taught you, you have some rare natural talent and an equally rare path of 'nurture' to reaching this point, you are one of maybe ten in the world fit to sit at this 'table' thus you have 'value', you have five-to-ten years of half-decent health left on this planet, time to capitalize and land an agent and some clients, etc.. etc..." I was more like "I think my family and/or total strangers may respect me more if I were a 'Database Administrator'
, I think I'll ignore the fact that I'm an expert in the horse racing industry, and instead focus 100% of my energy on getting a mediocre community college degree through a rehabilitative services program for the disabled, yadda, yadda, yadda...".
So now I'm healthy enough to walk the dog, for the first consistent stretch since 2017. I just turned 40 this month. Going to be a lot of fun. As far as actually betting I was able get hot a couple times at Saratoga, but the highlight was to finish the year while really working out the kinks of angle that I had previously only done in a thought experiment. It's a little funny, because I had misremembered some the existing searchable info on the topic. I thought that it had been layed out and defined in clear terms, by a previous active member of this very own board, but it hadn't, and my angle was actually me having (correctly) built in a direction from something that didn't quite happen the way I remembered it.
Having more fun than ever. And learning. I actually LEARNED something the other day. Friend whom I would never hold a technical horse racing discussion with, but I was open-minded, and her observation was simply brilliant. Just a nugget of common sense that, provided it has a bunch of particularly suited models moving in the same direction; is yet
another fruitful angle.
Abundance of wealth in this game. Abundance. Results and money does not matter to me. Instead of excitement and fear and dopamine-release in a results-oriented manner, what I am getting is a process-oriented satisfaction.
