NOTE: This is not dedicated to celebrating deaths.
THE BASICS
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Each participant submits an unnumbered list of 20 celebrities
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Please submit your list to me via PM (see an important note at the end on this). Don’t be a dope and post it here – until after Sunday, Jan. 11.
-If your final list includes somebody who died prior to the deadline and you have no alternate, then you get zero points and cannot replace the celebrity with another.
- You can change your entry up until the deadline: 11:59 PM EST, January 10. No entries after that may be submitted.
Entries must CLEARLY MARK a few things:
1. An alternate (optional). You may, at your option, list up to two alternates, in case someone on your list passes away between the submission of your list and the competition begins and you don’t want to have to update things. It must be CLEARLY MARKED AS AN ALTERNATE; otherwise it will be the 21st and/or 22nd name on your list.
2. A joker (optional, but really you ought to do this). You can mark one name to score double points for you.
If you don’t CLEARLY mark your joker, you don’t get one. Just copying and pasting this next to the appropriate name
← Joker
will do the trick.
3. Clarity around people with shared names. There are two Quincy Joneses; both appeared on lists last year. If you want to pick one for this year, you need to specify: music producer or comedian?
-The game begins on January 11th. When a celebrity dies, I will do my best to post the number of points acquired for the death and who chose the person. But ultimately, calling out deaths is up to participants. Please address any scoring errors to me via PM and I’ll sort it out.
-The member with the most points wins.
-In the case of a tie at the end of the year, the following two tiebreakers will be used:
- Number of total hits (most wins)
- Youngest average age of hits
-I will send my list to a UP member so I can participate in this competition honestly – it will be returned to one of the first to send in an entry.
ELIGIBILITY
-Participation is limited to members whose accounts are at least one month old.
CELEBRITY REQUIREMENTS
- Must be a real-life human aged 18 or over as of January 1st, 2020. No animals or children permitted.
Exclusions:
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Executions.
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Deaths arising from the actions of forum members.
-If you are unsure if a person is eligible, PM me about him or her and I will try to answer.
- The Commissioner may, at his sole discretion, declare a name ineligible for lack of fame. (As commissioner, I’ve yet to do this in the three years I’ve run this.) If you list an alternate, it will replace the not-famous name in question.
SCORING
-To score points, the death must be announced on an U.S.-based, English-language national online news source listed below. Here are some examples:
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hosted.ap.org or apnews.com (Associated Press website)
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The date of death is what counts, not the announcement. If the person is not confirmed to have died during 2020, then it does not count. The date of death is defined as the day it was in that person’s time zone (a.k.a. local time) when they died. Scoring closes on January 11, 2021 for the purposes of this pool. Deaths unconfirmed (or unnoticed by us) until after January 11 do not score points.
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Dates of death must be confirmed, or at the least confirmed to be in 2020. If a shadowy figure is confirmed dead but it’s not known when that happened, points will not be awarded.
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Points for each entrant will equal (110 - Person’s age at death). If an age is not generally agreed upon by media, the highest age available (e.g., lowest score) will be used.
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If you are the ONLY person in the pool to pick a name, you’ll get a 10-point bonus.
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You can classify one person on your list as a joker, meaning that their total points (including the bonus) would be doubled.
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Finally, it’s ultimately the responsibility of each player to track their own scores. I’ll try to stay up with various deaths but I have some semblance of a life. So ultimately it’s up to you. ALL DEATHS MUST BE CALLED OUT BY JANUARY 10, 2020, to count.
ENTRANCE FEE
It’s free to enter. There are no official stakes. Side bets and cash entries can be set up by others, but it is not a requirement to take part in this pool. I will play no role in handling cash or adjudicating side bets (beyond official scoring).
