An 18 Year Old Played Counter Strike For Just 30 Hours Before Unpacking A Virtual Knife That He Sold For $169,000

What a crazy story that maybe under five percent of Barstool readers would understand so let me go ahead and try. You've maybe heard of Counter-Strike, which is one of the longest running first-person shooter video games in existence. It's the same game that yields those full arenas for their competitive tournaments that look like this:

FRIEDEMANN VOGEL. Shutterstock Images.

In the game, sort of like designer clothes and other stupid shit kids spend money on to flex, cosmetics are everything. There are "cases" which can be bought for real money, and give you a random, mystery-box type item after opening. Of course, 99.9% of the cases you open are going to yield you a regular ass weapon skin worth nothing. Knives are the most rare, and then you get into a bunch of weird cosmetic descriptions that make them worth zillions of dollars. Regardless, you can either keep it or list it on some marketplace where people offer you real money for whatever you just pulled. People play for decades and spend God knows how much money and will never sniff a knife let alone one worth $169,000. 

That's where this 18 year old comes in. He apparently got banned from a similar game called Valorant, so he decided to play Counter-Strike for a couple of days and open a few cases. That's when he unboxed one of the rarest knives in the history of the game, a couple of pixels that are worth $169,000 of REAL money. It's called some blue gem karambit or some other nerd terminology you and I don't care about. I tried finding the odds, which is apparently impossible, but it's something like 1 in 1 billion according to the Internet.

Some of you might think this is NFT-esque levels of scam, but it's actually far from it. For some reason, for what is now well over a decade, these weapon skins and knives have had an unbelievable market. And, in simple terms, there's only one market versus a bunch of bad actors making a bunch of rug pulls. This is sorta what I imagined NFTs could be but at least this thing is somewhat practical in that you can flex on a bunch of other nerds in the middle of a Team Deathmatch game. And I don't understand why you'd spend nearly $200,000 on a virtual knife but that's the free market baby. Barbers are charging $1350 for haircuts. 

One thing about gaming is that it will never fail to amaze me. I wrote a blog about Twitch's biggest streamer going to its rival for a 2 year, $50 million contract a few weeks ago.  There's a reason kids these days want to be streamers and not astronauts or President. Simply put, there's a lot of money in this shit.

This story seemingly has a good ending because he's taking his money and running because he doesn't come from wealth, and is using the money for college. Good on him, and the rest of us can just sit here and wonder how and why this is even a thing. Video games man.