Aim Here

It already feels like a blockbuster ending to some of us. I've been sitting on the most fragile Dead Pool lead you can get since December 8th, and waiting to see if *any* pool picks (other than the ten survivors in my pool) cark it and deprive me of my lead (if just one person dies between now and Jan 1st, then out of the surviving 617 contenders, 516 of them land psv_killie with a win. Miguel has 11 chances of a one-hit win and I have 10). What's annoying is we're in the stages where it's getting increasingly likely that I might win. I estimate that the probabilities have crept up from 2% on December 8th to about 40-45% right now. The tension is racking up, and every new post in this thread twitches my blood pressure up by half a notch. If someone IS going to die before the bells, could they please get it over with quickly and save me the stress.

If we're going with the 'laugh at the arsecheeks' genre, then HibsFan's chronicle of the Sevco banter years thread is surely the best in that category, as well as surely having the highest greenie count of any post on P&B.

Here's a list of your outstanding fixtures, including the two that just went up today. I don't know which are currently being played. |-------+----------------------------| | Round | Fixture | |-------+----------------------------| | 12 | XCTR94 vs mackieboz | | 15 | XCTR94 vs Dandies1983 | | 16 | Basedgodsa1nt vs XCTR94 | | 17 | XCTR94 vs markf268 | | 18 | DieHardDoonhamer vs XCTR94 | | 19 | XCTR94 vs N5_Spur | | 20 | PnbMathematics vs XCTR94 | |-------+----------------------------|

Division B Table and Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts redVtop 18 17 1 0 52 pleslie999 17 14 1 2 43 PnbMathematics 18 11 2 5 35 Basedgodsa1nt 17 11 1 5 34 Dandies1983 15 9 1 5 28 N5_Spur 16 7 1 8 22 RBWatson 17 6 1 10 19 mackieboz 14 4 1 9 13 markf268 14 4 0 10 12 DieHardDoonhamer 17 4 0 13 12 Dustysghost 18 4 0 14 12 XCTR94 13 1 1 11 4 Round 19 redVtop vs Basedgodsa1nt pleslie999 vs Dustysghost Dandies1983 vs markf268 mackieboz vs PnbMathematics RBWatson vs DieHardDoonhamer XCTR94 vs N5_Spur Round 20 pleslie999 vs redVtop markf268 vs Basedgodsa1nt Dustysghost vs mackieboz DieHardDoonhamer vs Dandies1983 PnbMathematics vs XCTR94 N5_Spur vs RBWatson

Division A Table and Fixtures Division A P W D L Pts ancientnoise 15 14 1 0 43 The_Curmudgeon 16 12 1 3 37 DearyMe 13 11 1 1 34 AimHere 14 9 0 5 27 stewartmathers 14 8 0 6 24 KenDeans 17 6 2 9 20 AlbinoRov 16 4 2 10 14 invergowrie 16 3 4 9 13 AH13STU 9 3 0 6 9 beef2711 11 2 2 7 8 Arabjoe 12 2 2 8 8 The_kid1433 13 1 1 11 4 Round 19 invergowrie vs AimHere ancientnoise vs AH13STU The_kid1433 vs AlbinoRov DearyMe vs The_Curmudgeon stewartmathers vs Arabjoe KenDeans vs beef2711 Round 20 ancientnoise vs invergowrie AlbinoRov vs AimHere AH13STU vs DearyMe Arabjoe vs The_kid1433 The_Curmudgeon vs KenDeans beef2711 vs stewartmathers As usual, results and calculations are on the spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwODlp2A0TBMf2VuyjJox4ZaiyNKmLk37TH0_HrC-jk

If you need to go out with a bit of whimpering, I did a seasonal scores check. By my reckoning: Michael W should be on 295 instead of 297 (probably added to the wrong high score row) ICT Johnboy should be on 220 not 230 (adding) alta-pete should be on 199 points (missed Shane Macgowan, probably) Lex should be on 93 points not 85 or 83 (no idea where this number comes from) I think 101 should be on 90 points not 60 (Missed VC bonus for Shane Macgowan)

Hibs fans have done their own unofficial pitch inspection and their report is that Ross County are a bunch of shitebags.

Much as I want to see every death from here until 2024 stricken from the scoresheet, Derek Draper was one of Mandelson's spin doctor's during the Blair years and ended up being in a couple of political scandals at the time. His wikipedia page barely references his wife.

Strangely, this seems to have taken place hours after the death of one Frank James McAffrey, a teenage GAA player https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/sport/gaa/frank-james-mccaffery-tributes-paid-28308409 Perhaps a coincidence, or someone's skimmed a headline and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Or there's a time travelling killer robot trying to stop the descendants of some Frank McAffrey from halting the robot uprising.

That was what it used to be famous for, until the plastic surgery industry came along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism

There's multiple meanings of 'past 4 games'. There's the last 4 fixtures I've put up here, the last 4 game results reported here, the last 4 league games played in your chess.com account, and so on. The fixtures I'm putting up look fine, the last 4 games in your chess.com account have issues of extra confusion (like a game against AlbinoRov that doesn't match the result reported on November 8th) so I stopped when I realised that gets confusing. Of the last 4 of your game results reported in this thread, I did spot an error in the spreadsheet for the very last result (recorded the wrong way round) and I've fixed it. Sorry about that. If that's not the problem you had, then please clarify.

The narrowest in recorded history is when DBA took the title from Albino Rover by 4 points (498 to 494) in 2017. As things stand, 2023 is not quite THAT close, in that technically I'm in the lead by 22 points, what with Ryan O' Neal being the presumptive holder of the last gasp bonus. It only comes down to three if someone else scores in a way that doesn't otherwise affect the top two standings. So here's to a long, healthy, happy life for everyone in the dead pool roster.

You're right. Fortunately it doesn't affect the fixture list, just a brainfart when putting the titles on the postings.

Division B Table and Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts pleslie999 13 12 1 0 37 redVtop 13 12 1 0 37 Basedgodsa1nt 15 10 1 4 31 PnbMathematics 15 9 2 4 29 Dandies1983 13 8 1 4 25 N5_Spur 15 6 1 8 19 RBWatson 15 6 1 8 19 markf268 13 4 0 9 12 Dustysghost 14 4 0 10 12 mackieboz 13 3 1 9 10 DieHardDoonhamer 14 2 0 12 6 XCTR94 11 1 1 9 4 Round 17 redVtop vs Dandies1983 Dustysghost vs PnbMathematics RBWatson vs Basedgodsa1nt pleslie999 vs N5_Spur XCTR94 vs markf268 mackieboz vs DieHardDoonhamer Round 18 Dustysghost vs redVtop Basedgodsa1nt vs Dandies1983 PnbMathematics vs pleslie999 markf268 vs RBWatson N5_Spur vs mackieboz DieHardDoonhamer vs XCTR94 As usual, results and calculations are recorded on the spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwODlp2A0TBMf2VuyjJox4ZaiyNKmLk37TH0_HrC-jk

Division A Table and Fixtures Division A P W D L Pts ancientnoise 13 12 1 0 37 The_Curmudgeon 16 12 1 3 37 DearyMe 12 10 1 1 31 stewartmathers 14 8 0 6 24 AimHere 12 7 0 5 21 KenDeans 15 5 2 8 17 invergowrie 16 3 4 9 13 AlbinoRov 12 3 1 8 10 AH13STU 8 3 0 5 9 beef2711 10 2 1 7 7 The_kid1433 11 2 1 8 7 Arabjoe 11 1 2 8 5 Round 17 invergowrie vs The_kid1433 AH13STU vs The_Curmudgeon stewartmathers vs AimHere ancientnoise vs beef2711 KenDeans vs AlbinoRov DearyMe vs Arabjoe Round 18 AH13STU vs invergowrie AimHere vs The_kid1433 The_Curmudgeon vs ancientnoise AlbinoRov vs stewartmathers beef2711 vs DearyMe Arabjoe vs KenDeans While checking up very old unreported results, I notice that there's a game in the chess.com gamelist that matches the round 4 fixture between Arabjoe vs AH13STU, where AH13STU timed out. Is that right? @arab_joe @Leicesterlichtie

Reuters is reporting that he's switching prisons, which might explain why he's been incommunicado for a while. Also four people picked him, so you're not getting your deadly duo bonus, even if he's dead.

If it's any consolation, the number of misspellings of Shane Macgowan should be vastly reduced this time round.

How does that work? "Sorry, I can't pull that cracker with Uncle Derek, I'm researching which of Linda Nolan or Shannen Docherty has the more malignant cancer?"

If you're going purely by age, the statistically optimal age to pick is 106 for men and 108 for women. Finding 15 106-to-108 year olds who'll leave a qualifying obituary is left as an exercise for the player. Illness is a better mortality predictor than age, and age is a better mortality predictor than a lifestyle prone to unnatural cause deaths. There are celebrities who get in the news because they're terminally ill, and there are celebrities who stay out of the news because they are terminally ill. The former are easier to find. The solo shot bonus is nice, but it's a tradeoff; other players en masse tend to be better at guessing deaths than you, to the extent that, on average, the solo/dual bonus doesn't compensate for it. But every year a few players hit a bunch of solo shots and race to the top of the leaderboard. This may be down to luck, or skill. Keith Richards is obviously immortal.

That would be Ryan O' Neal, my very own pick, and it would nudge me into first place. I'm all for nobody else dying until the end of the year, at least. Just nobody ask where I was when Glenys Kinnock got shot!

The main reason for doing so would be to prevent a rival player's picks from scoring in a way that accrued a lot of bonuses, and typically, that would mean stopping the picks from dying in December. So the most obvious symptom of this would be a rash of deaths in late November. Now funnily enough, this November did actually have a St Andrews Day massacre of sorts, with Shane Macgowan, John Byrne and Henry Kissinger all dying mere hours before the Deadly December bonuses kicked in. There's no indication that any of these deaths were foul play, but then again, if there was that would accrue a different set of bonus points, defeating the object of the exercise. It would make sense for a dead pooler to cover their tracks. On the basis of cui bono, I took the liberty of checking out which of the Dead Pool player roster stood to gain the most from the hypothetical assassinations of Macgowan, Kissinger and Byrne prematurely, as opposed to them dying in December, by noting the difference in score table placement between the current situation and the hypothetical December deaths scenario. The most likely Dead Pool assassins are listed in the table below. Now I'm not saying that any one of these guys did assassinate Shane Macgowan and Henry Kissinger, just that these are the ghoulish degenerates with the most reason to. Make of this information what you will. Also, @El Guapo, can I just ask where you were on the 29th and 30th of November? Player Hypothetical Placing New Placing Places Gained El Guapo 94 64 30 Arch Stanton 50 22 28 BillyAnchor 65 38 27 sleazy 51 25 26 pub car king 41 21 20 nessies long lost ghost 72 52 20

Yeah, but did they get a qualifying obituary? It's pretty easy to spot the Old Firm fans here what with their whataboutery, their 'none of the above' team flairs and the constant, unrelenting monotone drone of synthetic, weaponized outrage that gets imported from all that Northern Ireland shitebaggery. Even if they avoid the subject of their football or political affiliations entirely, the mindset just somehow seeps through the screen. Anyways, nearly everyone here will have lost friends or relatives to cancer. It's a fucking shite disease, for sure. But unless we're actually involved in science or medicine, there's nothing much we can do about it outside of throwing a £2 coin into a Cancer Research collection tin now and again. Gurning and yowling and retargeting your normal-for-you synthetic outrage reflex away from Bloody Sunday or the Shankhill Bombing or whatever Chris Sutton said the other day towards cancer in general does exactly and precisely absolute bugger all to stop anyone dying from cancer, MND or Alzheimer's disease. You're not doing anything constructive other than making yourself feel better by this transparent display of performative self-righteous indignation - and continually hunting for things to be perpetually outraged about strikes me as a thoroughly dismal way to exist, whether it's from one or other ethnonationalist diehard in or around Northern Ireland, or from an Old Firm fan, or from yourself. And of all the people who's deaths we should make light of, celebrities and politicians - people that we generally never meet, who profit from making decisions over our lives or from these fake parasocial media-generated relationships - are about as 'fair game' as anyone is. (This goes four times over for Royals, who not only qualify as both celebrities AND politicians, but also get granted political power merely by being born, transfer it by dying, and even, in the UK, literally profit financially from the deaths of their subjects. If you die without a will or known heirs in Lancaster or Cornwall, the royal family gets all your stuff and adds it to their personal business portfolio). The least these mostly exploitative b*****ds can do is provide us with some entertainment while they're robbing us. This is a punching-up exercise, if it's a punching exercise of any sort. We're not killing these people, you know. We're not able to stop them dying, and all the horrible things that people die of are just (so far as we know) inescapable facts of life. We might as well amuse ourselves while we're along for the ride. I understand that this might not be for everyone, but nobody's forcing you onto this thread. You're here for your own entertainment, same as we are. Meanwhile...

That's not so true in Deadpool. It seems that going for solo shots would tend to be a sub-optimal strategy, because the points you get from solo shots and deadly duos aren't enough to counterbalance the 'wisdom of crowds' effect of most people being better at guessing hits than you. On average anyways. There are always statistical outliers and, in the current pool, someone who picked 2023's most popular picks would, as at the time of writing, only be 23rd. Someone who picked 2022's most popular survivors would be sharing 64th. TxRover's strategy is probably only going to guarantee him a mid table position.

The more advanced deadpoolers have the remission rates and mid term prognoses of prostate and lung cancer already memorized. Dead Pool is where we keep the fine sport of amateur oncology pure and unsullied by professionalism unlike those sellouts working in the medical industry.

Division B Table and Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts pleslie999 13 12 1 0 37 redVtop 13 12 1 0 37 Basedgodsa1nt 14 9 1 4 28 PnbMathematics 13 7 2 4 23 Dandies1983 12 7 1 4 22 RBWatson 13 6 0 7 18 N5_Spur 13 5 1 7 16 Dustysghost 13 4 0 9 12 mackieboz 12 3 1 8 10 markf268 12 3 0 9 9 DieHardDoonhamer 12 2 0 10 6 XCTR94 10 1 0 9 3 Round 15 redVtop vs RBWatson PnbMathematics vs N5_Spur XCTR94 vs Dandies1983 Dustysghost vs DieHardDoonhamer mackieboz vs Basedgodsa1nt pleslie999 vs markf268 Round 16 PnbMathematics vs redVtop Dandies1983 vs RBWatson N5_Spur vs Dustysghost Basedgodsa1nt vs XCTR94 DieHardDoonhamer vs pleslie999 markf268 vs mackieboz