16th June 2026

Start £297.83

P&L £239.61

End £517.10

Total P&L £400 (£999,600 remaining)

First day of Royal Ascot. As usual got dragged into having a few bets. Full marks to the two Joseph O’Brien jockeys who frontran the Ascot Stakes at a slow pace and finished top two. Zero marks…in fact, negative marks….to every single other jockey. What do they get paid? £140 a ride or something? With the added incentive of a share of the prize money and the global recognition. And not a single one of the other 18 runners once tried to win the race. The race that they’ve been paid to try to win. It beggars belief.

Ascot has such a ridiculously tight last bend and short run-in that those sort of tactics always pay dividends because….well….physics ‘innit. Ascot up the straight course is a wonderful track but Ascot on the round course – particularly with a big field, as in this week – is just a waste of time. It’s a nonsense track.

Had a small bet on Mission Central in the King Charles III, which was exciting to watch.

Lovely bet in the 6.30 at Beverley. I really do like the bets that back themselves and work out. A big £70k horse (Waasil) @ 4.1 that ran a Topspeed of 66 FTO (first time out) versus a small £15k horse (Out Of This World) @ 1.85 with a penalty that ran a Topspeed of 9 FTO. Backed the winner in win and place, laid the fav and also backed Weleyff as it was bought for £145k and coulda beaten both. But he didn’t quite know enough FTO.

Anyway, whatever. From having roughly £30 two days ago to having £517 today I’m very happy. Now we need to do the same multiples with the £517. Onwards and upwards in the mental battle.

17th June 2026

Start £517.10

P&L –£512.10

End £5

Total P&L -£112 (£1,000,112 remaining)

That was just atrocious. Felt really good coming into today then proceeded to mindlessly click the mouse and eschew all the feel and experience that had taken me from £39 to £517 in just two days. Beyond madness. I feel like the fire has somehow disappeared. Mind coaches would undoubtedly have a field day.

18th June 2026

Start £5

P&L –£5

End £0

Total P&L -£117 (£1,000,117 remaining)

Royal Ascot annoys me. Because I’m no good at it. And allow myself to bet there. But one of the traits of a successful professional risk taker is excellent table selection (if you’re playing poker) or excellent race selection if you’re me. Betting at Royal Ascot is fcuking awful table selection. And I know it. So clearly I’m still very far from OPM territory. Because there’s no point having all this knowledge and expertise but not putting it into practice.

I like following the golf. And it infuriates me beyond belief when a player makes a stupid mental mistake. Annoys me SO much. Cos it’s just wasteful and needless and I know they the player is better than that. But here I am doing exactly the same thing….except thirty times worse! I’m like the club pro who qualifies for The Open each year, shoots 69, 70, 68 to put himself in the top 10 going into the final round. Then shoots 92. Not 74 or 75, but 92. That man would be an idiot but everybody would like him because he’s nice and everyone loves an underdog story. But if you can’t live up to your potential then you’re simply a loser. Period.

That said, of course I backed Amo Racing’s Pikachu in the 2.30 at Royal Ascot to win, Top 2, Top 3 and Top 4. No prizes for guessing it finished 5^th. If it had been frontrun it it would have finished first, second or third. But that huuuge Frankel stride simply couldn’t be galvanised into a quickening pace having sat off it. So he was left kinda floundering in no-man’s land, going up and down with that big stride. If they send that to Ripon NTO for its Maiden it wins by 13 lengths if they want to use it.

Back to the P&L…got the £5 up to £11 and then tumbled it down to 90p before the Britannia Stakes, the 5.30 at Royal Ascot. Then laid We’re Goosers for 20p at 2.57 Top 4 as I don’t see it finishing first 10, let alone top 4. And backed Godolphin’s Tales of Wisdom 20p win at 27.0 and 10p place at 6.7.

To have a meeting of such import, though, where the horses drawn low on the Straight Course are at a six length disadvantage isn’t really acceptable is it. Come on Royal Ascot.

Anyway, so we’re down to 60p coming into the evening action. That’s a long way shy of £1m. And now we’re down to zero. So that’s the end of the quest for now. Have set myself a monthly £100 deposit limit so I guess we’ll have to try again come July 1st.

19th June 2026

Start £0

P&L £0

End £0

Total P&L £0 (£1,000,117 remaining)

A funny thing happened yesterday and it’s worth reporting. Because this column (blog/whatever) is clearly only about a mental struggle. I can back winners and make money no problem. To this end I’ll detail many of the previous times that I’ve made fabulous multiples then lost the lot in my next post.

But if you can’t keep the money that you’ve made then you might as well not have made it in the first place. Cos you’re Net Zero. Not Climate Fraud Net Zero but P&L Net Zero. And I’ve been like this for a long time. Not just in relation to money made (either trading futures or sports betting) but also weight management, relationships, jobs, appearance and drinking.

I’ve worked out that, due to imprinting when I was young, my subconscious came to associate a state of not being in control – of having no agency, of having decisions taken away from me – as being safe; a state that would keep me away from harm. That’s basically all your subconscious is there for…to constantly and obsessively look out for threats and to direct you through any medium possible towards an energetic state that it perceives as being safe.

The only problem is that ‘safe’ is quite often not actually safe, rather simply the most repetitive content in your surroundings. Mostly because if you’re still alive and come to no discernible harm as a result of exposure to whatever the repetitive input is then it MUST be safe………..right?? Wrong. Your subconscious is an automaton with no room for nuance and no understanding, even, of words. I call it ‘The Lumbering Beast’. There is no logic, it operates on instinct, energy and images (whether real or imagined) alone.

So an insightful adult observing situations that a young you is repeatedly exposed to would probably sense something was slightly off within those interactions. But your subconscious doesn’t see that. It simply sees the end result – SAFE (aka no overt harm or trauma) – and takes that as confirmation that whatever energetic exchange just happened IS safe. And, most importantly, must be repeated in order to keep you safe in the future. n.b. this works the same way even if actual trauma was involved. Your subconscious simply chooses a specific state and laser focuses on it even though it may be completely missing the point.

But that’s when the problems arise. And where, IMHO, nearly all repeated detrimental behaviours labelled as ‘addiction’ stem from. Because your subconscious has learned that xyz state is safe and it needs to keep you safe, so you need to be constantly returned to the same energetic state. And it uses whatever medium is at hand to get you there. Mostly that takes the form of booze, drugs, sex or gambling. But the medium is actually irrelevant. It’s the state that you get returned to that’s important.

Said another way, you’re not addicted to booze, drugs, gambling or sex themselves, rather they are simply the medium used to achieve an energetic state your subconscious thinks is good for you.

But it turns out that being in the state of xyz isn’t safe at all, in fact it’s detrimental to you as an adult. But your subconscious doesn’t know that and simply keeps doing what it’s essentially been programmed to do. That’s why I call it The Lumbering Beast. Cos it’s just like a zombie in the movies; it won’t stop and has no reason.

So my catastrophic declines after days or weeks of exceptional trading/betting are simply my subconscious trying to return me to being ‘safe’ – which just happens to be the state of having no agency, control removed from me, of blocked energy. Which correlates perfectly with nothing in the betting bank, nothing in the actual bank, no partner, no continuity of employment, etc, etc. All pretty debilitating things as you can see and highly isolating, lonely, security-free and just generally a bit shit.

But something changed a few months ago. I’d been trying all sorts of modalities to change things and suddenly felt like I wanted to be with someone….or rather that I could allow myself to be with someone. Which was the first in over twenty years. And, lickety split, I’ve found myself in a great relationship with someone totally fab. While continuing to work on myself I had hoped that would bleed over into my betting, eating, drinking, employment, etc. And it has sporadically but not consistently.

But over the past 48 hours something has shifted inside of me. Firstly I’ve totally lost my ‘fight’; the burning fuel that has raged for so long to keep me going through unemployment, isolation, homelessness, accumulation of debt and persistent, decades-long, failure. I don’t mean that I’ve given up hope, rather that I don’t feel like I have to fight any more…that my default setting doesn’t have to be that of ‘Herculean battle’. And that’s weird.

I’ve been sitting with it to see what it does. And it seems quite happy and content. Almost like a normal person feels, I imagine. Naturally I’m scared of losing my drive and fight because it really is something to behold. ‘No hole too deep that I can’t dig myself out of it’ is almost tattooed on my forehead.

But the best part is that now that the relationship piece is sorted, the debt piece is almost sorted and the booze piece is sorted, I feel – strongly in fact – that both food and betting no longer have to be my master. That I can actually now use them as a tool to get me to where I want to be (wealthy and slim/strong). i.e. I can be their master….or to put it another way, I can be in control.

Which is a first. And feels weird to even be saying it. Mostly because it’s the polar opposite of the status quo has been for the past 20+ years. But it’s 100% what I feel. And that, motherfcukers, is a fricking nice feeling.

So I guess we’ll have to see how that pans out when Degen2OPM has a second iteration come the next £100 deposit on the 1^st of July.