I used to run a blog series on Barstool Sports called The Bookie Chronicles. It was a series that shared degenerative-gambling personal stories from the Barstool community and it was very funny. Mostly because it covered just disgusting behavior that a lot of us find relatable.
In that spirit, I wanted to reprise some of the stories because they were ultimately deleted during the blu-blah-blee thing-a-ma-jig. Or some bullshit like that.
Disappointed, I decided to archive every Bookie Chronicle submission for a later usage such as right now. So here we are.
You can find last week’s blog right here.
As usual, all of these are submitted by you guys. So feel free to send more in to Carl@CarlsBlogs.com.
Let’s get to this week’s submission.
Plasma For Sale
It is very pleasing to connect with all the fellow losers out there. After selling plasma to pay my bookie this past week I stumbled upon a stroke of luck cashing a James Conner prop bet to start my week up 200. Not even 24 hours later the suckbag champions league ropes me in with absurdly appealing odds on a draw, very common occurrence in soccer I lose out on another 150 by a last minute goal that was overturned by a goddamn video referee (ouch). Following this pain its time to make some real money as I need to make a down payment on spring break I hop on brewers ML and team total at 3.5 enter Josh Hader and the rest is history goodbye Spring Break and goodbye to another quart of plasma.
Back at it tomorrow money never sleeps
I don’t know who needs to hear this but you donate blood and sell plasma. That’s the big difference. Donating blood takes a half hour whereas plasma is a bigger time commitment and typically yields about $30-70 per session.
I know this from firsthand experience in a very similar situation.
Although at the time, I wasn’t following suckbag champions league. It wasn’t until years later that I would feel the pain of late-match VAR decisions that rip the last leg of a multi-team parlay to shreds.
Now that I can relate, I would say I hope you get your shit together. Spring Break should never come down to Brewers anything, and that goes for everybody.
Nice thing about being young though is you bounce back from plasma donations much faster than 37. And while I don’t know firsthand at this age, I can fairly assume you just don’t bounce back from stuff at this age any more. And obviously it only gets worse, so you do your best to completely ignore that.
But right now my back is sore from taking a long walk the other day. My back. And it was a nice fuckin walk let me tell ya something.
My point is that your plasma-donation window isn’t as wide as you think. So enjoy it while it lasts because one day nobody will want your blood or your sperm or any other fluid. One day your stains will be “gross” and “hard to clean” so unload while you can if you know what I mean.
At Least I Didn’t Get Shot
Was just back in my hometown reminiscing with high school friends over this debacle that took place 15 yrs ago.
Come March Madness I was the only from my high school group that had a bookie on campus so I offered to place our tourney bets. This was ’04 when Dee Brown and Illinois kicked ass and took names during their run until they lost to UNC in the finals.
The four of us decided to all throw in $100 and bet till it was gone. Started betting $50/game. After first four days we were on fire, hit a lot of Individual games and some small parlays to go up around $1k. Next weekend decide to up our bets to around $150/game and we finish the weekend up $4k. Typically this bookie had people clear their tab every two weeks, but being young and naive, and not wanting to come off as a dick with march madness ending in a week I didn’t ask to confirm my balance or cash out. Final four hits and after the championship game we pick up another $1k to put us at $5k for the group. $1250/person at age 20 is like winning the fucking lottery.
I text my guy a few days later saying I’d like to stop by to pick up the cash. I get there and he gives me $1000, so I ask where’s the rest? He starts playing dumb saying he threw away all records from the tourney as everyone should’ve squared up going into final four, so all he had was my final four plays. Note we placed bets by calling them in, texting was relatively new in ’04 so he was scared to have bets stored on phones. I start to get a bit heated, explain its not just me, it’s three additional friends who he might have a problem with. He refuses to budge and we hit an awkward silence. He then stretches his arms so his shirt becomes untucked and I can see the handgun he had tucked into his waistline. He asks me if we’re going to have any problems or if this convo is over. Like the fucking pussy I am I just walked out and accepted I got roasted.
Took my friends a month to believe what happened and not think I kept all the money for myself. Oddly enough a few years back when I was drunkenly rehashing this story with my college crew I was told he shot someone, soooo kinda happy with my decision.
Nice thing about FanDuel is they won’t murder you.
Bad thing is you have no memorable stories with the boys when your logging online casino play at 4am and chainsmoking cigs in your underpants. That shame lives and dies between you and Jesus Christ.
So while advances in technology make for a safer and more fluid sports betting environment, I will always argue that the decades-ago tradition of using voicemails and burners and landline-bookies was much better in totality. There’s obvious downsides to both but when you add everything up, I think that era built more character and delivered more value.
That’s the important thing in gambling. Everybody’s always looking for value.
One time I lost 15 NFL wagers in a row and then woke up to a cooler of skirt steak on my front porch. I had to pay out the next Tuesday but I’ll never forget waking up to the cooler of steaks and a note from my first bookie. He was an old school friend of my friend’s dad, and the relationship goes back to some neighborhood bullshit days that long precede me as a twinkle in my father’s eye. So needless to say it was a massive sign of respect for me to eat these skirt steaks, and I enjoyed every bite.
These days you don’t get any of that customer service. There’s no touch or grace to the experience. Instead it’s so predatory in all the ways that don’t involve aggravated assault and discharging a firearm. There’s fancy graphics and slick promos and big tits bouncing in your face while you’re trying to take a dump. It’s very hard to ignore and for those reasons I think it’s actually a pretty lame culture. I’ll talk more about it from personal experience as we go but overall it’s pretty fuckin gay.
For now I just wanted to say congrats you guys didn’t get shot. Those Illini teams were sick and I’m probably doing a whole wake up week later this month with that 05 team. So thanks for the good memories but again – good thing you guys didn’t get shot by your bookie.
That would blow.