2023 Rich’s Ramblings:

Week 18 and Year-End Results

For the second straight year, I am congratulating long-time theDodger participant SickPuppy for winning the year-end title and the 1^st prize spoils. He is once again our year-end champion, scoring a rare defense of the title he earned in 2022. Last year he needed 168 points to win the pool, but this year he topped that with 170 points to claim victory by two points over his closest competitors. It’s never easy, and in fact one player had a chance to catch him, as G$ was only one game behind and had picked Miami to beat Buffalo in last night’s game. When Buffalo prevailed, G$ was dropped to a three-way tie for 2^nd-4^th prizes at 168 points. The three pool veterans who will evenly share 2^nd through 4^th are G$, Nick, and WawbeekBombers. Wawbeek in particular had a strong Week 18 to move from a 5^th place tie up to the prize-winning position. It is fitting that these four players won the four year-end prizes, as the next closest competitor, in 5^th place, was three full games behind the prize winners. The number of bananas won by the year-end winners are listed below. Congrats to the winners, and thank you to everyone for a fun season. As I said last year, long live the king, SickPuppy!

We had a nice large sidepool pot of 1020 up for grabs in Week 18. With no more weeks to roll it over, it gets split by the top sidepool scores in this final week. Congratulations to BillsMafia, CiscoKid, and WawbeekBombers. They will each get a tidy pile of 340 bananas for splitting this final sidepool prize.

Other year end prizes were earned as follows:

The Best Loser prize might have gone to our 5^th place finisher, CiscoKid, but since she was involved in a 4-way tie for 1^st and 2^nd in Week 18, she drops from Best Loser contention, and gives it up to our 6^th place finisher, BarrySanders, who failed to win a single prize during the season. Kudos to the loser!

The Bonus King could have been claimed by G$ or WawbeekBombers, who both had the top tally of 5 bonus points, but since they won for finishing in the top 4, they are ineligible to claim a second year-end prize. This means one of the ten players who gathered 4 bonus points wins the honors. Bourne is this year’s bonus king, as he had the best year-end score of the ten people with 4 bonus points. As noted in the Ramblings throughout the season, to avoid splitting this smallish prize between many winners, I decided to break any ties based on the top score.

Pay the Middleman prize goes to the person landing right in the middle of the pack. This year we had 78 people in the pool, so the coveted spot is in position 39. Congrats to dracarys495 for landing in this lucky spot! As also noted in the Ramblings this season, I changed the rules for Pay the Middleman too, to only pay one prize, and not water this down by also paying people who tied with dracarys495.

Finally, the Booby prize is a bit tricky…while LightningStorm had the lowest score of 105 points, the rules require that you can’t win this prize if you fail to pick (leave blank) more than 5 games during the season (typically missing making picks for Thursday games.) LightningStorm, and Cartwright both had too many blank games to be eligible for Best Loser. This means that the grand Booby champion is none other than theDodger himself, who managed a score of 131 for the season, 39 points behind 1^st place, and he picked all but two of the 272 games available to pick this season. Congrats?!

Please see below for a chart of the year-end winners and bananas.

As for Weekly results:

Week 17 had a 7-way tie for the prizes. Congrats to TheGreek for breaking the tie and claiming the 1^st prize of 90. We have a 3-way tie for 2^nd that will be split by BigAl, Moe$$, and MoneyBall.

Week 18, always tough to pick since some teams have nothing to play for, saw four people tie for 1^st and 2^nd with an impressive 13/16 for the week. Congrats to BillsMafia, CiscoKid, TheGreek, and WawbeekBombers for finishing the season in style. They will split the combined 1^st and 2^nd prize, winning 140/4 (35.00) bananas each. As noted above, three of these four were in the sidepool, and also split that pot.

Thank you for all who participated, congrats again to SickPuppy for his impressive back-to-back wins in 2022 and 2023. If we all are willing to send our bananas to SickPuppy, I hope to see everyone back next year!

2023 pool Final Standings, through Week 18

Final Place	PlayerName	YTD	Wk 17 Rank	Prize	Bananas
1^st	SickPuppy	170	1^st	Y/E 1^st	590.00
2^nd (t)	Nick	168	3^rd	Y/E 2^nd – 4^th	178.00
2^nd (t)	G$	168	2^nd	Y/E 2^nd – 4^th	179.00
2^nd (t)	WawbeekBombers	168	5^th (t)	Y/E 2^nd – 4^th	178.00
6^th (t)	BarrySanders	158		Best Loser	65.00
8^th (t)	Bourne	4 bps		Bonus King	50.00
39^th	dracarys495	151		Middleman	50.00
76^th	theDodger	131		Booby Prize	40.00

theDodger 2023 accounting

I have calculated the prizes for the season, based on the 78 entrants for the year. The eighteen weekly prizes will be 90 for 1^st, and 50 for 2^nd. I have determined the year-end prizes (100% return, less the 50 website fee), as follows:

1^st 590

2^nd 295

3^rd 160

4^th 80

Best Loser 65

Middleman 50

Bonus King 50

Booby 40

If you want to be in the running for the Booby prize (low score for the season), then you must try to pick winners for each game. You will lose the chance to win the booby prize if you fail to make your Thursday picks. I’ll allow no more than 5 blank Thursday games to be eligible for the Booby prize.

The Year-end prize rule change implemented last year will remain this year too. I offer two smallish prizes for “Pay the Middleman” and “Bonus King”, but lately these have often been split between several players, watering down the prize significantly. Therefore I will only pay one winner for each of these prizes. You get the Middleman prize if you end up exactly in the middle of the pool, based on the algorithm the website uses to list players who are tied. One winner only…a bit more luck involved, but the prize will be more meaningful. Same with Bonus King…if there is a tie, this will go to the player with the highest cumulative score in the Year-end race.