How it All Began

Instead of simply answering why I chose to attempt acquiring an alcohol addiction and subsequently quitting it, let me paint you a picture.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2024 and my long-time degenerate friends are gathered. I use the term “friends”, because “collection of seven dudes I’ve known since high-school and have been in a daily groupchat with for over a decade even though I now hate at least a couple of them” doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way.

Anyways, we’re doing what we’ve done the last five years. We’re gathering, like a fantasy draft, to select our bets for the year. 

This “personal life player props” league was an invention of mine that began as my gambling-addict way of predicting the outcomes of everyone’s lives. I’d place lines on things happening, like “Brandon loses his job +700”, and at the end of the year we’d review.

After a couple years, we started actually predicting things. Then we put money on it in 2021. $100 apiece. We organized it more the next year and made it $500. Then, after a connection with Vice in 2023, we decided to step up the stakes and the intensity and we made the league a $3,000 buy-in. This escalated things drastically, the props went under extreme scrutiny, and we added a lot of “aspirational props” in which people could take on different difficult challenges ranging from “Over/under 7.5 milk stouts consumed by Allen in one sitting”, to “Jason catches a predator”. 

Vice fired almost everyone and we lost our show. But the league had intensified so much in anticipation of filming that there was no turning back. That year we had the most intense league imaginable with an $18,000 first place prize, and the tampering with each other’s lives to induce negative outcomes like divorce, job loss, etc ruined many relationships in the group. But somehow we all still gathered for the NYE party as planned, and as we drank and reminisced on the year’s hijinx, we all agreed to run it back.

Mind you, at this point my drinking was limited to weddings, the occasional bachelor party, and this New Year’s Eve party. Aside from that, I was a one beer and done kind of guy. A designated driver, if Uber hadn’t rendered my kind useless. But that night I was on one. So I added a prop: Peter becomes an alcoholic and quits, +1600.

My friends laughed, but when I wagered 20 of my 100 point bankroll on the prop, they thought I might be for real. Two of them even wagered 5 points on it. The rest rolled their eyes, knowing I was drunk. Allen, who has a prop on him going to rehab at only +300, rolled his eyes the hardest. It may have just been his natural expression, though. Allen was on a lot of drugs.

My thought process? I was drunk. And I was loving it.

The next day I had an unforgivable hangover and felt disgusted with myself for wasting 20 points of my 100 point bankroll on such nonsense. 

Then my pyramid scheme withheld 90% of my earnings, and I got banned from several of the sportsbooks I was making the majority of my income on, and the money dried up quickly.

So, with $40k to first place in this year’s league, I took the most direct route to victory and picked up the bottle.

Cheers.