Alex Dusek, VERY shortly after winning over $300,000 on ‘Million Dollar Minute’ in 2014! (Look closely and you can still see the flitter drop falling).

Hello and welcome to the next interview in my series of checking-in-with-game-show-big-winners-after-quite-a-while-to-see-what-long-lasting-differences-their-win-has-made-to-their-lives.

Catchy name, eh?

And today sees the first instalment of my catch-up interview with Alex Dusek, who won $307,000 on Million Dollar Minute back in 2014. Back then, I interviewed Alex not long after his win, when it was all very fresh… So I was really keen to check in again and see what the lasting effects were for him. So I did. And here’s the first instalment of the resulting chat. Enjoy!

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SH: Hello Alex! Thank you so much for agreeing to this little chat today.

AD: Oh, no problem at all.

SH: Since I recently realised that it was 20 years since my Big Win, I’ve been speaking to –

AD: Wow, 20 years?

SH: Yeah. And because I did a little post about the difference it’s made to me in the years since then, I started to wonder how others feel. So I’ve spoken to Russell Cheek who won Sale in 1992, and Matt Parkinson who won Sale in 1993, and I’m also going to speak to Blair Martin, who won Temptation in 2007. It’s just checking in, a fair way down the track, to see where they’re at. So I thought I would reach out and talk to you as well.

AD: Love to be included. That’s really great. Excellent.

SH: I did look back through the last time we spoke, 11 years ago. You were 26 years old, and you’d recently won $307,000 on Million Dollar Minute.

AD: Yeah, we had a really good long chat.

SH: Yes, it ended up being seven instalments on HowToWinGameShows.com. And so… How have you been for the last 11 years?

AD: Really, really good. It’s been up and down. I think when we spoke, I was at the beginning of a film degree at SAE in South Melbourne. And then I was trying to get work in that field, and doing freelance work. And then it was part-time work, then full-time videography… And then it was feeling like I hadn’t really found something that suited me that well. And it was a career change to data analysis. So yeah, all roads have led to there. But I feel like I’m a much wiser 38-year-old human being compared to back then.

SH: Yeah, because there was quite a bit of talk in the interview about your passion for film and the inspiration of Patrick Hughes, a Melbourne person who went on to direct some big films. And back then, you were thinking about putting your winnings towards a film project of your own. Did that end up happening?

AD: No, no, that didn’t, in the end. I certainly had the money there and it was like, ‘well, this will be something in the future’. And I was always steeling myself mentally, emotionally to keep at it in the film world, and try and write something and try and do something. But in the long run, I realized that I was really just trying to keep up an idea of myself. I wanted to be this writer or director. It was a romantic idea and it was nice, but it wasn’t really that practical of what I probably was good at and should be doing.

So that led to this career change, it probably changed a little bit. Like I was always into horse racing and stats, so I started doing a podcast around horse racing form analysis. So that was a creative project that is a bit of a different lens. And there was some ideas for sketch comedy that I had, but I didn’t really stick at that.

And I’ve still got ideas to write something, but I’ve never really followed through on it. So it was sort of just dreams that change tack a little bit.

SH: Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s smart. Like sometimes people just get this notion in their head that they have to go down this path… And I remember a line from Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where Bialystok says to Bloom, very emphatically “NEVER PUT YOUR OWN MONEY IN THE SHOW!” So in a way, I’m glad to hear that you didn’t do that. I hope you did something sensible with it. (Not that your film wouldn’t have been sensible, but it’s a very high-risk thing)… It’s good that you knew yourself so well at such a young age, that’s really good. And what’s the podcast called?

AD: It’s called Form King. And it’s a little half-hour show each week, where I just preview the weekend’s races. I try and talk a little bit about what might happen, try to look at some racing form. I find that it’s out of all the betting options that you’ve got, whether it be sports or politics, racing’s quite complex. You’ve got track conditions, whether it’s wet or it’s dry. You’ve got distances changing, jockeys changing. The form obviously changes every week with every different line-up of horses. You could have a race of five horses or 20. Tracks obviously change. There’s just all these variables, so it’s a constant re-balancing. And I find it very fun to try and analyse how it’s going to change, where there are opportunities to make money, or something might win or a favourite might go down. I do question whether with that analytical sort of thinking, why don’t I just look at something more practical like shares rather than horse racing, which is at the end of the day, very fickle.

You can do all the analysis in the world and come to some really great conclusion, but if that horse just isn’t feeling well on the day and doesn’t want to run, it all comes to nothing! So on the podcast, I try to intersperse just those weekly episodes with a few interviews.

One time I interviewed a strapper just to get a more practical understanding of horse racing, because I understand it through the lens of a form guy, but I’m not a person who really understands much about the sport itself. And I want to get a professor on – someone who actually studied gambling – to understand why people are drawn to this, because I’ve always been into it.

SH: I have a friend who is exactly like that. And he’s a keen punter, but a really informed and educated punter. I’m going to recommend your podcast to him – I think that’d be just his thing.

AD: Thank you, that’s awesome.

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Join us back here next Tuesday for the second part of the interview, in which Alex details exactly HOW the big win changed his life, and speculates on how things might have been different if it had never happened… See you then!