I'm Getting Tired Of Fantasy Games

So several years ago, as I was conducting my alma mater's football Game-watching party, a person who starting coming to these events at the beginning of the season tipped me off to a fantasy football Game that his son and his friends started up.  He said it was so successful that it has become a full-time job to his son's friend.  As a courtesy but also as someone who has played fantasy football for decades now, I looked up this website, and frankly, it blew my mind.  It's chock full of, not fantasy football, but fantasy-related, gambling-adjacent games in which you pay money to win.  Think survivor pools, betting Against The Spread, etc.

It's gotten so big over the past few years that it quickly expanded to other sports, such as golf, basketball and soccer.  I in turn migrated to those offerings.  But of course it costs money to buy into these games.  And I have yet to win.  Probably not even close.  And that's because, with some regularity, I forget to play.

I stick mostly with survivor pools, where you have to pick one team each week of a league's season to win.  If you pick one that loses, you are out of the game.  Ingenious concept, and cutthroat too.  The problem is is that it's a season-long thing, and I am so busy that I have often forgotten to turn in my week's pick.  The deadline to pick a team, and rightly so, is just before the first Game of that weekend's worth of Games.  If you don't pick a team, you are automatically eliminated.

And that's what has happened to me more than once.  I don't know the exact number because I would hurl myself off a bridge if I figured it out.  But I kept absent-mindedly forgetting that I forgot inputting a team the previous season and threw my money (actually paid for my ante through PayPal) into that pool the next season, and it would be 50/50 if I would remember playing week by week.

I finally got tired of basically lighting my money on fire last week.  It was only the third Matchday of the English Premiere League, and I tossed in for the EPL survivor pool on this website.  I got busy thinking about my fantasy football drafts and auction and planning my way around the State Fair, and despite this website texting me reminders that I need to pick before I can't, it slipped my mind.  And once I realized that the first EPL Match of the weekend came and gone without me making a pick, I realized that I just threw away my money.  It's not much -- I want to say $10 -- but you could have a couple decent fast food meals with $10.  And combine that with all the other times I eliminated myself from pools simply because I forgot to make a pick before the deadline, and I mentally had it.  The past couple weeks was the start of college and pro football, and with it all these pools and pick 'em games that went along with it.  I would toss a few shekels in at least a couple of them, but not this time.  Nope -- I would just forget to play, and I would be wasting my hard-earned dollars again.

I'm just not good at remembering to come back to do these things on a regular basis, at least when it comes to quasi-gambling games online.  If there are competitions where you just make all the picks you have to make in one sitting, like the tournament for NCAA men's basketball or, just recently, the Knockout Round for the FIFA Women's World Cup, that's obviously perfectly fine.  But I get caught up with work and life and stuff, and it's not that important to me, especially when I have to tend to the fantasy football teams I've had for more than half my life.  I just wised up to the fact that I'm giving away money like this, and I feel better (at least for now) telling myself, "Enough!  What am I doing?"