Cumulative Record: 9-6
“Dammit, now I actually have to do the stupid thing,” I say to myself as Clay Travis’s Week 1 picks article comes up on a Google search. Spouting off an asinine idea is something that I specialize in (the entire blog staff and commenters nod furiously at this admission), but I rarely go through with them. Unfortunately, I put this one out on the internet.
First things first, find a bookie. Because I am an idiot, I started the process by googling “sports gambling website best” and looking at the search results. Almost every website that pops up is written, at least in part, by an LLM, and my main takeaway about sports gambling websites is that there are SO. DAMN. MANY. OF. THEM. Remember that guy with the worst sports jacket of all time? His is there (Circa Sports). There are also BetMGM, Caesars, the Rivers, and the Borgata, to name a few of the casinos I recognize. Then there are DraftKings and FanDuel, the two websites that have done more to ruin ESPN than any harassment lawsuit. There are approximately seven thousand additional websites. Each of them has a different promo code, raising the possibility that I’ll sign up for several at some point this season to take advantage of the bonus bets.
I go with DraftKings because why not do this experiment on the website platform that I generally despise? I spend about twenty minutes giving over all of my personal information and then another fifteen minutes pondering the extreme likelihood that these platforms get breached by hackers. I create a deposit that does not work the first three times I try to give DraftKings money (AN OMEN??). Finally, a fun animation lets me know that DraftKings can now access my bank account.
Next, I pull up Outkick and have the feeling you get when you walk by a massive pile of dog shit in the middle of the sidewalk because the dog’s owner, for reasons known only to a higher power, believes the world wants to interact with it. Clay made 15 picks, and I dutifully took the opposite of every one of them. After making all of them, I scroll back up to the top of the article and realize that Travis has created two hashtags, #respectthepicks and #getrichkids. Reader, it is now a week later, and I am still laughing at these hashtags. I work them into conversation so much it is a wonder that my girlfriend has not broken up with me and written them in graffiti on my porch steps between some four-letter words. Everyone, including the legal system, would take her side.
Thanks to Clay’s 6-9 performance (nice), I am now winning money. Maybe fading Clay Travis is the key to riches. The excitement is palpable.