You’re either a leader or a loser and leaders need to lose to become better. I’ve been losing.

Highlights

• Down $2,800 sports gambling since 7/1/23
• Lost 168 rating points in Chess since 8/13
• Hurt foot and Achilles training for 10k
• Evan beat me in golf
• Got dumped

Sports Gambling – I asked Simoncini at Sam’s party what he liked about the blog and he said most of it. I’m not sure what I expected, but even 1 person saying they like to read makes me do it again. As a sports bettor, he’d feel in good company to know that I’ve been getting CRUSHED betting on golf. Bradley Todd is the tout I follow and he bets on 10 different tours. I can only bet the PGA, LPGA, Champions, DP, and Korn Ferry. So when he hits a 150-1 on the Finnish Open in back to back weeks, it’s not a fun feeling missing out. He also uses the places in golf which I won’t get into, but it’s another reason I’m losing. Nevertheless, football is coming so I’ll try to offer some helpful picks. I said take Josh Jacobs as OMVP @ 60-1. Silva likes Tank Bigsby for ORofY at 75-1.

Chess Rating – After hitting a high 2 weeks ago, it’s like my brain lost every bit of chess knowledge it possessed and my winning mindset turned into mush. It’s indescribable the way it works. The crescendo was slamming my keyboard after a back rank checkmate and the feeling of foolishness while my beer spilled everywhere was immense. I’m taking a break.

10k – A ran a 10k on August 12th at Belmont Plateau and got 6th place out of 81 runners with a 7:54 pace. There were a lot of hills on trail so don’t let the pace fool you. The sad part was two weeks earlier I hurt my foot and Achilles seeing how fast I could run a mile (5:40) on Kelly and that was a bad idea. It sabotaged my training a bit, and I wasn’t peak form, but good enough to feel like I ran a solid race. The Achilles still hasn’t recovered but I wouldn’t mind getting into 5k form again.

Evan Beat Me in Golf – This one is hard to swallow as I think I’d won about 500 rounds in a row aside from a simulator round and one in 30 degree weather with 30 mile per hour winds. To his credit he won by 8 strokes, and earned it with 10 pars on the round. I played poor which was shame because I had been playing pretty well with an 82 just 1 week earlier. Just one of the those days but streak is over and there is no more pressure. I’d still like to think I can break 80 before the season ends but we’re running out of time.

Getting Dumped – I can write a whole post on this, and maybe will, but I’ll share some of the cliff notes. This 6 week fling ended with a “let’s just be friends.” Our biggest problem was she liked me. I kept telling her, I don’t operate like someone with normal emotions. When she could see that I wasn’t prioritizing her, she didn’t like it, which I totally understood. So that was it. I’d still say I like her, but we were entirely different people and forcing it didn’t seem like a great idea.