Never thought I'd have to impliment this rule.......

This is a little inside baseball for everyone, but when you use the template that I send out, I don’t actually look at your picks.  There is a second tab that has all of your picks laid in out in a way I can copy and paste them into my master scoring spreadsheet.

I do put everyone’s picks through a checker to make sure nobody leaves something blank or has a winner of a game that is not one of the two teams they have playing that game.  If you don’t have anything like that, I literally just copy and paste.

The reason I bring this up is because I was looking through some of the people that can still win money, and at least 2 (there may be more, I’ve only found two so far) have exactly the same picks from the same person.  There are only 5 games left, so that may not be so strange, but in both cases, the brackets were by the same people, and had the same number of points.

I thought that might still be OK, since maybe they changed some early round games, and won some and lost some, but they just coincidentally had the same number of points.  So, I looked at what was sent to me.

Sure enough, all 63 picks were the same in both brackets both times.  I’m guessing that this happened because the people sending me picks didn’t label them correctly, or accidentally saved one over the other.  I’m going to have to implement the rule I have in the football pool.  If either of these 2 sets of brackets makes the money, I am only paying out the top spot, and then I am moving everyone else up one spot.

I don’t like doing that because it invalidates all the stats that I’ve been running.  For instance, say these 2 brackets finish tied for 4^th.  Well, now I would pay them out for 4^th place only, but someone else that had no idea they were in-line for the money wins 5^th, when they could only finish 6^th before.  That’s great from them, but I may have told them they were out last week – and so stopped paying attention.

For future reference --- If you are sending me multiple brackets – especially if you are using the template --- MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE NOT SENDING ME MUTIPLE VERSIONS OF THE SAME BRACKET.  I will be adding this to the instructions for next year.