2022 Rich’s Ramblings:

Week 18 and Year-End Results

A big congratulations to long-time pool participant SickPuppy for a great year of picks. SickPuppy ended strong, nailing 11 games in the final week to pull away from his closest contenders, winning the year-end pool by three points with a year-end total of 168. He took sole possession of the lead in the pool way back in Week 11, and was able to stave off all attempts to wrest that lead away from him. That said, a valiant effort was made by 2^nd place finisher CamDaMan (165 points), and third-place finisher Foxtrot (164 points) who both applied pressure to SickPuppy, and pulled within a game of the lead late in the season. Finally, the 4^th place prize will be shared by a trio of winners, at 162 points, a couple of games behind Foxtrot. Congrats to SueDoranDumb, SweetMan, and WawbeekBombers, who will carve up the meager 75-banana 4^th place prize in the year-end pool. SweetMan actually would have found it more profitable to avoid this prize, as he was in position to win the larger “Best Loser” prize. But the person running this pool is evil, and he wants people to miss out on Best Loser by winning smaller prizes, so oh well. Congratulations to all the year-end winners for a great season of picks! Long live the king, SickPuppy!

Other year end prizes were earned as follows:

The Best Loser prize drops pretty deep in the standings. SweetMan’s loss is a gain for sassinator and Pikachu, who claim the prize by finishing in a tie for 14^th place. Each of the 13 players above them (plus two others who are tied with them) won at least one weekly prize or year-end prize, making them the top players to not win a single banana all season. Kudos to the losers!

Last year the Bonus King was won with 6 bonus points for the season. This year the bonus points were doled out less readily, so a total of 4 bonus points was the best anyone could muster, and only two people managed to hit this mark. Congrats to Nick and to G$ for winning the most bonus points. Nick is the winner of the prize, as he had the better year-end score. 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 77 people in the pool, so the coveted spot is in position 39, as that player “beat” 38 players, and “lost” to 38 others. Congrats to BrotherBruce 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 BrotherBruce.

Finally, the Booby prize is a bit tricky…while GSpags91 had the lowest score of 119 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.) GSpags91 frequently failed to pick the early games, including all the Thanksgiving games, thus disqualifying him from the Booby prize. The grand Booby champion, therefore, is MiserableJetsFan, who managed a score of 132 for the season, 36 points behind 1^st place, and he picked every single one 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 4-way tie for 2^st place. TheHacker and WawbeekBombers remain tied after Week 18, so they will split the $50 prize.

Week 18, always tough to pick since some teams have nothing to play for, saw three people tie for 1^st with an impressive 13/16 for the week. Congrats to BarrySanders, DKalmer1020 (with random picks), and Pudge07 for a good final week of picks. They will split the combined 1^st and 2^nd prize, winning 140/3 (46.66) bananas each. BarrySanders is the only sidepool participant of these three, so he takes down the last sidepot of 275.

Thank you for all who participated, congrats again to SickPuppy for his impressive win in 2022. I hope to see everyone back next year!

2022 pool Final Standings, through Week 18

Final Place	PlayerName	YTD	Wk 17 Rank	Prize	Bananas
1^st	SickPuppy	168	1^st	Y/E 1^st	560.00
2^nd	CamDaMan	165	3^rd	Y/E 2^nd	280.00
3^rd	Foxtrot	164	2^nd	Y/E 3^rd	160.00
4^th (t)	SueDoranDumb	162	6^th (t)	Y/E 4^th (t)	25.00
4^th (t)	SweetMan	162	10^th (t)	Y/E 4^th (t)	25.00
4^th (t)	WawbeekBombers	162	4^th (t)	Y/E 4^th (t)	25.00
14^th (t)	sassinator	158		Best Loser	32.50
14^th (t)	Pikachu	158		Best Loser	32.50
	Nick	4 bps		Bonus King	50.00
39^th	BrotherBruce	150		Middleman	50.00
76^th	MiserableJetsFan	132		Booby Prize	40.00

theDodger 2022 accounting

The eighteen weekly prizes are 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:

77 players * 50 = 3850, less 50 website fee = 3800 prize fund

(90+50)*18 = 2520 for the weekly prizes

3800-2520 = 1280 for year-end prizes:

1^st 560

2^nd 280

3^rd 160

4^th 75

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.