Despite getting seemingly smaller every year the Internet still manages to offer a vast array of strange and intriguing people. One of those is Austin or better known as Bossman Jack. By this point he’s already fairly well known but I’ll offer a short introduction regardless. Essentially he streams himself doing one of two things: Gambling or playing games. The latter really only when he’s currently waiting to receive more money to go back to the former. To give you a little taste here’s a short clip that manages to describe roughly 90% of his streams:
There’s a lot more where that came from but that’s the rough gist of it. So in essence he
- gambles,
- looses it all,
- gets mad that he lost it all,
- ???,
- and doesn’t profit.
The third step has played a role in his success and most of his streams for a while. It’s what sets him apart from other bigger streamers. If you watch them you’ll quickly notice how they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollar on online casinos for hours and not have the slightest reactions to losing the money. Similarly they also don’t care about any larger wins. Now I don’t make a habit out of watching gambling streamers so there are most likely bigger ones that actually do (pretend to) care. But as a rule of thumb the successful ones are all sponsored by the very casino that they play on. So in essence the money that they appear to be pissing away isn’t theirs and so they do not care. They might try to explain it in some big round about way that technically it is their money but ultimately they get paid way more than what they lose on stream and so they either have no reaction to losing or winning since it doesn’t really matter or if they do they’re just faking it to put on a show.
Meanwhile Austin is a little different. If you look at the clip above you might notice that he doesn’t have a door. That’s because he completely demolished it over multiple separate extended fits of rage. Similarly he has punched multiple large holes into different walls and broke several mice, keyboards, headsets and other peripherals. While some of it might appear to be just for show, in general it can be assumed that most of the destruction is a result of his real, uncontrolled temper. From his streams it becomes clear that he doesn’t engage in gambling like the big streamers do. He does it constantly and with any and all money he can scrounge up and while he usually does have sponsorship deals with casinos that grant him money to gamble with, he usually can’t make it last very long. While big streamers will piss away multiple millions over a 20 hour gambling binge Austin doesn’t have the same means. He’d have to be a lot more resourceful if he wanted to get a similar amount of time over the money he’s given, considering that he usually “only” gets a couple thousand per week from the casinos. Alas, that seems to not be within the realm of possibility and no matter how much or how little money he has, he will lose it all fairly quickly. If anything he’s gotten faster at it. Over the past months he has on multiple occasions gotten what some might call unusually lucky. In reality it’s just plain old statistics that allow someone who spends most of his waking hours on gambling to occasionally win.
His most recent all time high was a win of over $150,000 which he raked up at the casino of his, at the time, new sponsor. He did this by making continuously higher bets on dice. Yes, dice. Here’s him losing 25k in under a minute to that very same game:
As you can see the game is essentially just a coin-flip. In fact two of his other current favorites are just that. Limbo and actual coin-flip all boil down to a roughly 49.5% chance of winning. That’s about as good as it’ll get with most types of gambling. But regardless of the game the house always wins and so the money he “won” didn’t last very long as he slowly funneled it all back into the very same casino that he got it from. Before that happened he called his parents to tell them about his big win. This wasn’t the first time they have gotten this type of call from him and it probably won’t be the last time. They are very well aware of what their son is up to and don’t seem to have any idea on how to stop him and so they’ll just listen to his calls and his insane yelling and otherwise leave him alone. They don’t seem to even care about him calling drug dealers and having them deliver drugs right up to his house. If gambling on its own is bad then gambling under the constant influence of whatever Austin is having is just guaranteed to make it worse.
Now this entire story might be puzzling, sad or boring to you but it definitely opens up some questions to a lot of people. Why don’t his parents do anything about it? How did it even get this bad? How is he content with this situation? This could be discussed at length and there’s probably a bunch of psychology at play that I know nothing about but there’s one thing I haven’t really seen mentioned and that is responsibility. Not in the sense of who’s responsible for him ending up like this. I mean in the sense of how can he be content with this groundhog day like life and the fact of having lost so much money. Especially when he wins large sums of money in mere minutes just to lose it all in a similarly quick manner. My guess is that he knows that having that kind of money means a lot of responsibility that he’d rather not have. He could buy a car but that has a bunch of strings attached, so why even bother. He also doesn’t have places to be so it wouldn’t be of much use. He could get his own place and move out but then he’d have to cook, clean and maintain the place, pay his own bills etc. So losing it all really isn’t that big of a deal. It leaves him with no responsibility and allows him to pursue his favorite pastime: Gambling. Just too bad that it seems to clearly be detrimental to his health and surroundings. Taking some of his behavior into account it’s not too surprising that a lot of people have trouble feeling bad for him. He’s not exactly the most pleasant person to be around and as of right now there seems to be no chance of that changing anytime soon. In general it seems like a tough spot to be in with very few ways to get out. He’s been to rehab multiple times, which doesn’t seem to have worked and to no one’s surprise he’s also not very receptive to any kind of advice. In short moments of clarity he will acknowledge the situation he’s in but that is always only very short-lived. He’ll usually threaten to quit streaming and meander about how much he hates his life with a few hints of potentially “doing something stupid” and pleading for help. When asked about what kind of help he needs, he’ll tell you this:
Afterwards he’ll go back to gambling like nothing ever happened. Will he ever get out of this downwards spiral? Who knows. Is laughing at his misery bad? Maybe, but it has been, on more than one occasion, very funny even if the overall situation is bad. I guess the best thing to come out of this for now is that we shouldn’t look at him and his situation and say “wow look at this retard he’s so stupid, thank god I’m not him”. Instead it could be a little opportunity to acknowledge that we’re all a little bit like him in some way or another. I might not yell and insult my parents on the regular or destroy their property but there’s definitely always some room for improvement. Very motivating and inspirational, I know.
Anyways, who cares, let’s double chuck this on dice, it’s so fucking due.
tl;dr: Funny man lost it all again. Don’t get it twisted. Do not gamble. It’s a waste of money, time and sanity.