Y'know, before the whole world got wind of QAnon, I stumbled into this madhouse through a political betting game. It was nuts!

Picture this: QAnon's this wild tale where some top-notch Democrats, big shots in the government, and even celebs are tied up in this bonkers child-trafficking cult. And who's the knight in shining armor? None other than ol' Trump himself, ready to bust it wide open. This crazy story's led to some real rough stuff, like kidnappings and even a murder. But it also lined the pockets of this 28-year-old dude, Patrick Cage killer deal.

Back in 2018, this Cali guy who's all about saving the environment comes across PredictIt, an oddball betting platform. Forget cards and races; this one's all about betting on political shenanigans. Will Kanye make a presidential dash? How many tweets will Trump fire off this week? The site's catchphrase? ""Let's Play Politics."" It was like a political Wall Street!

Patrick was like, ""Hey, I've been glued to politics since 2016, so why not see if I'm any good at this?"" He threw down a bet on Kanye running for the top job.

""Man, I'm still riding high on that one,"" he boasted. ""Tossed in 20 cents in 2018 and got back a whole dollar!""

Truth be told, Patrick's hunches were hit or miss. ""It was a reality check—I kinda sucked,"" he confessed. But he kept noticing bets that just didn't make any sense. Take spring 2019, for example. PredictIt was giving odds that former FBI honcho James Comey would get indicted within half a year. And Patrick's there thinking, ""What the heck? Haven't heard a peep about that on the news.""

He digs around, checks the usual news spots, and even the far-right hangouts. Zilch. So he bets the other way, that Comey's not getting the cuffs. Then he starts seeing more of these screwy bets—Hillary Clinton getting charged, Barack Obama in the hot seat. And these weren't just one-off flukes. They kept popping up over and over again, like clockwork.

This one expert, Renée DiResta, she's talking about how right-wing social media has split from reality. And boy, she wasn't kidding.

That's when Patrick tuned into the PredictIt chatter, and it's like he's reading gobbledygook. And that's his Eureka moment—he's getting clued in on QAnon years before it's a household name. Q's supposed to be this top-secret source spilling the beans on a devil-worshipping UK Aims to Tighten Gambling Oversight: Poker Players Weigh In, deep-state cabal.

And boom, it clicks for Patrick. These QAnon folks are so sure Q's on the money, they're throwing big bucks at these predictions.

""You better believe I started throwing more cash into my bets,"" he shared. He hunted down QAnon tips on PredictIt and bet the farm against them. Anything odd stood out to him, especially if Dems were getting bad odds on indictments. He'd snoop around the news, check conspiracy hotspots, and once he pegged it as a QAnon thing, he bet they were barking up the wrong tree. Patrick raked in the dough every single time these QAnon predictions flopped—which was every time, according to him. He's turned $800 into around $1,200.

The way Patrick stumbled onto this was like getting a sneak peek into QAnon's rise, right down to the dollars and cents. And it's ballooned into something bigger than Q—it's a whole alternate reality now. QAnon's a stew of every wild theory out there, from anti-vaxxers to moon landing deniers, all sharing their tales.

You've even got Trump stirring the pot with some out-there voter fraud conspiracies. Nate Silver, the stats wizard over at FiveThirtyEight, he's tweeting about how cuckoo these prediction markets have gone. Like, they were giving Trump odds of winning states he clearly lost, with no chance of a do-over.

As late as mid-November, PredictIt had people betting Trump still had a shot at presidency, even though Biden was already called the president-elect. It's probably more of that QAnon influence—believers were dead sure Trump would clinch it and throw the Dems in the slammer Top 5 Must-Follow Gambling Gurus.

Patrick reckons folks get tangled up in these conspiracy yarns slowly, then all at once. Someone might dip their toes in with a simpler theory, like a mom stumbling on an anti-vax post in a Facebook group, and the next thing you know, she's knee-deep in the weirdest of the weird.

Here's the real kicker about QAnon and its kin: it's not just a bunch of crackpots yelling into the void. It's like a fog creeping over society, and before you know it, you're lost in the haze. Somewhere on the flip side of Patrick's smart bets, real people are dropping real money because they're dead certain some anonymous online oracle's got the scoop cnn