Winners drink milk!
My photoshop of the Howl Dawn outline from Aggression by CanisAlbus
"So how did this picture find it's way to becoming the profile picture to all your accounts, Jam?"
Well, go grab your cookies, hot chocolate and your favorite ふわふわ blanket, for this is an EPIC tale about my stupid 14-year old ass that spans from 2014 to 2015!
It all started on 18th of December 2014. It was a normal Thursday. Save for that it wasn't a normal Thursday after all...
The sounds of my backpack tumbling across the vestibule downstairs were still heard as the rapid thumps of my feet were already sounding upstairs. As a any average Joe after a schoolday at the age of 14, so was I in the hurry of finally getting my daily dose of videogames and Youtube videos. But little did I know... That day, the Youtube dose was laced - in the "recommended" tab I was greeted by this video:
"CS.GO - From Nothing To A Knife" by Clicky Crisp
It had amassed a huge viewercount of millions by the time i saw it. It had been up for exactly 3 months. As late as I was, I was completely entranced by it. The cringy motivational speeches by Leslie Calvin "Les" Brown, Eric D. Thomas and Thomas D. Jakes Sr. in the background as the gun skins flew by to the rising counter of value in dollars were just the things to push all the right buttons for me. Eyes widened, heart rate increased as my ears were transforming the speeches into pure motivation for my veins to pump around my body. "You mean, I could do this? I can make my favorite game into a job? At my age?"
My Steam's total playtime counter for GS:GO was around 200+ hours at the time, I proudly wore a competitive rank of Distinguished Master Guardian (which was a huge achievement at the time considering most of my peers were around Gold Nova. Because they weren't CS:GO maniacs lmao.) and I was well aware of the value of knives. I mean, everyone desired to have at least one to get away from the peasant's default one and I was no different. I had always wanted one, knowing it was improbable that i would ever own one - I was convinced that it was a waste of money and that I would never buy one myself. But now I saw a beacon of light. I sold all of my skins and cases to buy 2 Phoenix case keys. Those case keys were the currency of the trading market. They were the only stable item as it was the only item of which the value was determined by Valve. And those 2 Phoenix keys were the beginning of something great...
NOTE: Before we go on, here is a quick summary about the differences between skins. Rarity level, condition, Stattrak - all of it is explained there.
Phoenixes rise from the ashes
2014/12/18 Total inventory value: 2 keys (4€)
Capital was there, now all that was left was to start the journey, to make the first move. The starting line for any trader back then was the infamous CSGOLounge:
From 2014 to 2019 and it still looks the same!
When my inexperienced ass arrived it was already a hellhole of crazed teenagers, who most probably got their start from the same video, looking to make a quick buck. Each trade post was accompanied by a description. If they were buying items for keys, it would be something the lines of "BUYNG QUICKSELLS ONLY, B/O 70% OF MARKET VALUE!!! IF YOU WANT TO OFER ME HIGHER THEN I FCK UR MUM!" If they were selling their items for keys, then the tone would suddenly change to a more polite one: "Selling this rare AK47 skin, it has 2 stickers so that means it's more valuable! DONT offer me lower than 90% market value!" Even the not-so-bright can see through this simple buy low, sell high strategy. Seemed logical to me, so i joined the rank and file of scum and posted my own "Buying quicksells only" posts. But it wasn't gonna fly with only 2 keys. No-one in their right mind was gonna quicksell a 3-key skin for 2 keys. My posts turned up nothing, instead they were met with hate.
Lesson 1: Market research is important.
So i dived into the Steam Community Market to hunt for a skin that was stable in value and at around 2,5 keys. I found 3-5 potential ones and picked 2 that looked the most appealing to me - "well if I'm gonna be trading these cool skins I better enjoy them too!" Then I searched up who were trying to trade those particular skins and went to bug every single one of them until one of them accepted. Enter the Minimal Wear M4A1-S | Atomic Alloy (with 2 stickers!):
The ecstasy of making my first profitable trade shot my motivation up even more! Over the next 2 weeks, it became my obsession. I was online as much as I humanly could, checking notifications for any new trades, messages, anything. I no longer even played the game, I just traded. And traded. And traded. So many skins passed through my hands. I even stopped caring about the looks - all that mattered was that the profits were stable. And they were - I was making a whopping average 0,3€ a day! It's hilarious in hindsight, I was ecstatic about working for 'slave-wages' as they call it now, but I was having so much fun. Besides, the fact that the numbers were growing, was a sign that I was doing something right and consequently that meant I could move to bigger trades.
Quick tangent: There were quite a few screenshots I took and uploaded to Steam at this time and they are worth sharing here just for the pure excitement and naivety that they preserve. I'm so goddamn glad I took these, the nostalgia is immeasurable...
There was one notable story where I bought someone's shitty 0,05€ skin because it's Battle-Scarred condition made it look "almost" black. And my inner business man thought that he could use it to his advantage. I knew that the default skins were hated and same applied for the default dark green skin of AWP. I thought that an "almost black" Battle-Scarred AWP skin was a better alternative that had the potential to be sold for a whole key! Default < Skin so that must mean Green < Almost Black right? Buuuut the self-coined "Much Black" skin was more like an AWP with sand smeared all over it. Just look at the screenshots and decide for yourself if anyone actually fell for it...
Default AWP skin
The "black" AWP skin (lol)
But moving on, in the span of those 2 weeks I had found where the wealthy and dignified did their virtual-weapons-trade business transactions - on Reddit, at r/GlobablGffensiveTrade. This is wasn't as much of a scumhive like CSGOLounge was and it was easier to navigate + there were a bunch of useful guides, Price Evaluation threads and more that CSGOLounge lacked. Furthermore, my first wave of excitement wore off and reality hit home that I was pretty much working 5 hours for 1 key (2€), which was getting tedious. So I thought, if I'm making an x% profit off each trade, then adding more capital would surely make it worth my while! I would, at the very least, get close to the minimum wage of youth camps which I had attended once (They paid 2€/hr) and it would be way more fun, because more skins means more shiny toys to look at, brag about and take screenshots of. I liquidized my skins into keys aaaaand cue the "Hey, dad, I found a way to make money from a game I love, can you please put some money to my Steam account?"
9 more phoenixes rise... from my dad's credit card
2015/01/12 Total inventory value: 6+9 keys (18€)
Years later I asked him why he gave me the money even after I explained him that I was gonna buy case keys, which were basically for gambling under the pretense that I was gonna use them to "make money by trading." And he said that a few bucks was a cheap price for the lessons I would learn either way:
- I would've learned about the worthlessness and dangers of gambling.
- Or I would've learned about how money, the stock market and trading works (Which I did, thankfully, instead of gambling, tho I did do that too.).
Well, 15 keys in hand, I could now set my sights on the big leagues, I bought an AK-47 | Vulcan and continued.
But why continue my usual way of exchanging one skin for another slightly valuable one? That wasn't netting me much and it felt that with a bigger bank there must be a better way. Few trades later I got to a Battle-Scarred AWP | Asiimov. Then, a day later I got my hands on an improved, more expensive Field-Tested variant of the same gun which, as I learned, were very widely used for betting on the results of professional CS:GO matches, as for some reason they were one of the most stable items. They were aptly named the Field-Tested Betiimovs. Trading those Betiimovs served me well - I saw that I could buy these at a bargain from gamblers who wanted to liquidize their winnings fast and sell it to other gamblers who needed them for their next fix and didn't bother hunting for cheap prices.
Lesson 2: Gamblers are easy to profit off of.
A few beloved Betiimovs later I got an offer. 12 skins for another one of my Betiimovs I had just gotten. At first I thought that was ridiculous, why would I accept this trade? It would be a nightmare to sell them off one by one. But, being the overly enthusiastic thorough market analyst that I was I could not let any trade go unchecked from the fear of losing on profits. So I collected the Community Market prices, checked their stability, ran over the demand and key prices on r/GlobalOffensiveTrade and CSGOLounge on every single gun and saw that this guy was overpaying by quite a lot! This had potential... "Maybe he's gullible, lemme haggle it even higher!" After some stupid arguments about how he had to overpay even more to make it worth my while to sell these individually he added an extra 2 skins for a total of 14. I had gotten the Betiimov for 26 keys and this offer was worth around 32-34 keys.
I pulled the trigger and went ham on trying to sell these things. I maxed the r/GlobalOffensiveTrade and CSGOLounge trade post limits and ultimately got 31 keys out of these skins in the span of 2 days. It took more work than haggling Betiimovs (Because I had to sell off a boatload of skins instead of 1), but I made 4 keys off this and that was double of what I would've made otherwise. And this particular trade was significant for it finally put me in the range of my prized goal...
My first knife...
2015/01/22 Total inventory value: 38 keys (76€)
Caption on Steam Community:
"God damn, i love the flip it makes when you equip it! ★ Bayonet | Urban Masked Field-Tested"
Holy fuck! I actually made it happen!
I was sure to tell everyone. My family, friends, everyone got to experience all of my capacity, strength and sagacity, faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity. In my eyes, I was a GOD, I was a MONEY PRINTER, nothing could stop me... Before long I would be a millionaire, I could then buy all the games, potato chips and soda I could imagine, I would get all the girls in my class, I would revive the dinosaurs, bring world peace and become the ruler of the galaxy!
Well, it was an important day for me. A huge landmark. Nevertheless, after jumping around admiring the symbol of my achievement on an empty server, there wasn't a moment to lose. This knife was dear to me, sure, but how could I be satisfied knowing I could get an even better one! And then an even better one still!
Over the next days I made an average of 1 trade a day. My strategy was:
- Buy knife with keys at a quicksell price
- Sell knife for a 1-3 keys profit
- Rinse and repeat.
- ???
- Profit
I knew I was making less than I could have with other strategies, but I loved jumping from knife to knife as seen from the screenshots on Steam Community and their cute captions:
2015/01/28 Huntsman Knife | Night (Field-Tested)
2015/01/28 Flip Knife | Crimson Web (Field-Tested)
Actually, I found another comfort spot for a few days alongside Betiimovs - the Field-Tested Crimson Web Flip Knives were pretty popular for some reason. I traded through 4 different ones before getting bored of knives and moved back to Betiimovs. Only difference now was that I could afford 2 of them at once, so my profit margins rose. Then after a week I could afford the vanilla Bayonet variants, which I traded for a few days before moving back to those beloved Betiimovs again.
2015/02/06 Bayonet Vanilla
2015/02/06 M9 Bayonet Vanilla
Stay humble
2015/02/10 Total inventory value: 62 keys (124€)
Before I mentioned how toxic the trading platform of choice for cash hungry teenager known as CSGOLounge was. And back then I was disgusted with how people there acted too, and so I decided to be better. Even if they were my rivals and competitors, I tried my best to treat every trader with respect. Of course it wasn't an entirely altruistic decision. It was partly because I knew that people would be less likely to trade if I acted like an asshole - I myself had turned down many trades from douchebags alike. And I did get a "oh okay, you're the first polite trader I have met here so I'll accept your terms" once in a blue moon. But at the same time it felt good to be the change that I wanted to see. And it actually worked in my favor at this time, because I met someone great from this...
One day, searching for my next Betiimov purchase I was met with a friend request from who I will call M. from now on. It was now my turn to experience the once in a blue moon event of meeting a stranger that didn't want to suck me dry of money while insulting me and damning my family to eternal hell. I was met with a warm demeanor and (mostly) correct grammar, which impressed me. He wanted to discuss a trade, obviously, but that fell through as we both realized that we were on the same journey of making as much money with no desire to trade skins for our personal pleasure. Just as two real estate brokers would not be able to sell each other houses, we could not sell each other skins we only wanted for resale. Profit was not made that night, what was made instead that night was my first internet-friendship. We spent the whole evening chatting about our lives, the state of our countries, what we wanted to achieve with trading and probably some other things too. I actually slept in because of this heartfelt chat. What was especially interesting is the heartwarming exchange of our very different worlds - he was an adult and taught me about what he had experienced (girls, money, work, dreams, schools, travel) and I taught him everything I knew about trading (mostly about Betiimovs). I am saddened that Steam does not keep chatlogs, but I remember holding that chat close to my heart. In fact the more we talked the more I respected him. At first I was suspicious about this grown-ass man tolerating a 15-year old's banters - there must be an underlying goal. But that turned out to be bogus, he turned out to be a genuine respectable man. And I decided to gift him a skin that he seemed to love a lot, he had mentioned it as one of his dream skins.
As of 2019/01/19 aka 4 years later, it's still in his inventory!
The Minimal Wear (I could not afford a Factory New one I guess, haha.) Glock-18 Water Elemental. Many such skins have passed through my inventory with similar tags: "From X to Y" and it has always been a sorry sight seeing that people have traded their gifts away. My old friend, M., who I haven't talked to, but who has remained in my friendlist did not trade my gift away. And for that I am deeply grateful.
Lesson 3: Sometimes strangers on the Net are respectable humans too.
A tempting apple called "the game of chance"
2015/03/10 Total inventory value: 126 keys (252€)
It was around march that I realized I had enough money to actually start spending some of it without losing out on trading. A fiver here and there wouldn't change if I could buy the next round of Betiimovs or a new knife. So this month saw an uptick of game purchases, a huge uptick if I'm honest. I also sold quite a few keys to my classmates around this time. One of them made 3 transactions with me for betting, which he sadly lost. I'd say it was sad, but it's not, considering the circumstances and his choice of "betting strategy" - kids, betting is bad and even if you do decide to bet anyway don't go all in. A few of the keys I sold to classmates who also wanted to get a piece of this "easy money" I was making after seeing my inventory, but none of my peers had the patience for this.
Eventually I actually started betting myself. I didn't really know anything about the teams, so I mostly lost. It wasn't until I discovered r/csgobetting that I started making some money. There were daily threads about matches with people analysing the teams with extensive knowledge and I started blindly following them. Surprisingly it worked well enough, but then I paid a couple of well known professionals a fee to get their insights for a month. I won some, I lost some, but in the end I came out a winner. At least from the perspective of gambling. That is, I didn't actually gain any money from betting, I came out of it with neutral to slight gain (a few bucks at best). And let me tell you, if you come out of a month long gambling craze with neutral balance, then you won. I'm glad I realised that gambling wasn't profitable and was taking too much of my time that I could spend trading. Back to my good old Betiimovs...
Lesson 4: Only the house wins in gambling.
Museum of knives
- 2015/04/29 Total inventory value: about 400 keys (800€) (It becomes hard to track the exact amount of keys from the trade logs from here on because I was trading multiple items daily)
- 2015/04/29 Total money cashed out: about 150 keys (300€)
- 2015/04/29 Total cases opened: 15 keys (30€)
- 2015/04/29 Total value of games bought: about 40 keys (80€)
Not much more notable happened during this time, aside from the huge profits I was making. I made quite a few screenshots of knives and rare skins I got to try out from this time that lay out the progression nicely and will lead us to this journey's climax:
2015/02/23 Butterfly Knife | Crimson Web(Field-Tested)
2015/03/01 M9 Bayonet | Night (Minimal Wear)
2015/03/03 Bayonet | Night (Minimal Wear)
2015/03/06 Karambit Vanilla
2015/03/17 Bayonet | Slaughter (Factory New)
2015/03/20 M4A4 | Asiimov (Field-Tested, but looks Minimal Wear or even Factory New)
2015/03/21 M4A4 | Howl (Field-Tested)
The last picture of the skin above, of the M4A4 | Howl, is significant because it had been my dream skin from the beginning. Secondly, it was a Contraband weapon, which meant it was no longer available from lootcrates. It turned out the community created skin had violated a DeviantArt user's copyright and was thus changed by valve and then made into a Contraband skin. If you wanted one, you had to buy one with a lot of money or trade for it. It was extremely valuable, rare and above all it was the best looking non-knife skin at that time.
Before and after the copyright shenanigans.
Original artwork that inspired the skin.
Thirdly, this is where I got my profile picture. Achieving this skin was the symbol that I had achieved everything I set out to do and then some. I never would have thought that I would be one day wielding the Minimal Wear Howl, which valued at over 300 keys. But there I was, and to celebrate I photoshopped myself a profile picture to always remind myself this monumental experience of my life.
I was an amateur at Photoshop, but the result looks decent if I do say so myself
The bigger they are the harder they fall
Betiimovs as a motif is presistent throughout this story, it is only fair to Chekov that the gun must now fire.
As much as I was trading the Betiimovs, it made sense to find regular sellers. And I had one that consistently sold me multiple each day. He went by the alias of "luca boring." We had conversed multiple times and I was starting to like him. But one day he said he probably will no longer be able to supply me with any more Asimoovs. Then he proposed to buy all of my inventory for Steam Wallet. I was hesitant, but he persisted, increasing his part of the deal to an extraordinary amount. I sort of felt that it was a bit too good to be true, but I also knew that people did ask for huge overpays when trading with Steam Wallet instead of skins or keys. I was conflicted - luca persisted. In the end he offered me such a deal that I was blinded, and I agreed. Before going through with this I transferred a quarter of my inventory to a secondary account. He bought 2 of my worthless skins on the Steam Marketplace for the total of 478€ and I traded him 151 keys for a profit of 88 keys - FROM A SINGLE TRADE! My profit graph had the sharpest bull ever in history. And everything was going great! I continued trading and trading and even foun-
You have been permanently banned for fraudulent activity
On the first of April of all days that was the message on my screen when I tried to log into my Steam account.
Lesson 5: If it seems too good to be true, it is.
Lesson 5: The Devil is with the face of a friend.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I would spank my 15-year old self for being the braindead kid that I was. Young me saw a way to make a quick buck and that was enough for his brain to slide out of his ass. What was I thinking... Oh right, I wasn't thinking at all. But anyway, I wasn't gonna accept my fate. I posted on CS:GO subreddits asking for advice and even got added by a couple of nice guys who had met the same fate. Some of them even recognised "luca boring." We formed a support group of sorts and tried to help each other with the latest info about their support tickets and other similar cases, one of them even helped me write my emails (Back then I did not know how to write formal emails.). And thanks to the people in reddit it dawned on me that he was a big time scammer who was laundering money from stolen credit cards. I also wrote an email to Steam Support, but was met with a canned response from a bot. Over the next weeks I sent Support quite a number of emails, but to no avail - only their automated bots got the pleasure of dismissing my pleas. If only I would get the chance to talk with an actual human - they would understand, right?
Meanwhile I continued trading from my second account, but I wasn't that into it any more. Sort of understandable, haha. I did a couple of trades here and there to buy a few games, but I was done with it. At the end of 2015 summer I cashed my remains out, which was about 200€.
The en- BUT WAIT! Half a year later, on the 11th of November 2015 I get a message from one of the guys in the "support group." He says he has been unbanned and he got back all of his inventory.
...
...
...
WHAT THE FUCK
JAM RISES FROM THE ASHES!
That day, I told the school nurse that I was sick and skipped rest of the school day. The sounds of my backpack tumbling across the vestibule downstairs were still heard as the rapid clacks of my keyboard already sounding upstairs as I was writing a new email to Steam Support. A few days later I got a response - from an actual human! After a few exchanges where I explained the whole thing from top to bottom, providing ample proof in the process I got unbanned. I immediately got all of my motivation back. It was time to break new records!
What followed was not interesting enough to recount here. It was the standard buy knives/Betiimovs and sell for keys, rinse and repeat. There were a few nice screenshots that I took tho, so here's a small selection of them:
2015/12/02 Karambit | Fade (Factory New)
2015/12/04 Flip Knife | Doppler (Factory New)
2015/12/04 Flip Knife | Marble Fade (Factory New)
2015/12/05 M9 Bayonet| Tiger Tooth (Factory New)
But after coming back in half a year something had changed... I noticed that items sold way slower than usual and people were way more stingier with prices. It just wasn't worth it for me anymore. Even at my size of my inventory at 400 keys, I was making 1 to 2 keys profit each trade. That was way lower than I was used to. It was like a warehouse, full of real estate brokers that tried to buy houses from each other with the only goal of reselling them and that's a cul-de-sac if I've ever seen one. It just didn't work. So I decided to stop, I cashed out most of my inventory for 900€ and left some of it there just in case I wanted to buy some games or come back to trading (which I did not).
All things must come to an end
A spectacular story if I do say so myself. Not sure how well that worked as a written one, but for me, as it was happening, it was one of the most important and profound journeys of my life. I'm not sure how to end this so I say to you all as the 12-year old player Adam "at0m" Keitel said after winning a knife battle with the professional CS:GO player iBUYPOWER swag: "Winners drink milk!~"
Adam "at0m" Keitel drinking milk, like a winner should!
