"What's the Longest Break You've Taken From Betting?"

Kingsley on SEN radio with racing.com. Segment courtesy of SEN x racing.com.

People ask me what the longest break I have taken from betting is. About fifteen years ago I took two or three months off. Not off work. I was still working every day. I just stopped having a bet. I felt my model was not good enough at the time, and I needed to work on the form and get it better. So I did that, and I left the betting alone while I did it.

Why I stopped

It was not a burnout thing. It was a quality thing. I looked at what I was doing and decided the model was not where it needed to be. If you know your edge is not there, betting through it does not fix anything. You are just putting money through a system you already do not trust.

So I made the call to stop and spend the time on the form instead. Two months of work with nothing running. That is the only time in my career I have really taken a period away from betting like that. It was not something I planned to do for that long. It just took that long to get the work done properly.

What it did to my head

The part that surprised me was the clarity. It is amazing how clear my head became during that two or three month period. I did not expect that at all. I thought I would just be working and waiting to get back into it.

You have to understand what my normal is. I bet on everything. I bet on sport. I bet on racing. I am betting in every state. It is go, go, go all the time. There is always something running, always a result coming, always the next thing to get across. That becomes the background noise of your day and you stop noticing it.

Take it away and the noise stops. I remember thinking to myself, is this how normal people feel? Is this what it is like when you do not have the stress of gambling all the time sitting there in the back of your mind? It was a genuinely different feeling. Not better or worse in a simple way. Just different, and worth noticing.

What I took from it

The work got done. That was the point of the break, and it worked. But the other thing I came away with was an honest look at what the constant action does to you. You cannot see it while you are in it. You only see it when you step out.

I am not saying everyone needs two or three months off. Most people will not need that. But if you have never once had a day where nothing is running, you do not actually know what your baseline feels like. You have nothing to compare your normal head against.

If you are in a spot where you think the work is not good enough, stopping to fix it is a reasonable thing to do. And if you have been going flat out for years without a break, take a short one and pay attention to how your head feels. That information is useful on its own.

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