At least someone picked each of the Final Four participants, meaning one person selected Louisville. Kentucky was the favorite at the start and they look to have a path to the title. Ohio State was the only one of the four to not be picked to win the title. Likely due to the Penn State leanings of many of the participants. I made the bold pick of Missouri to win it all, so I was done real quick.

See the entire ICH Pick Distribution.

I’ve been having trouble deciding on which game to use my wager points on for my ICH group this week. I’m leaning toward the Bears.

It may be surprising that I’m considering the one matchup that is split. I’m not surprised by the split. Nobody watched the Seahawks all year before last week. Then saw them beat a Saints team that didn’t show up and they were home. How quickly everyone forgets they were terrible in a terrible division. Their win last week is one of my three biggest reasons I hate the NFL.

Make Picks

Make ICH Picks

You pick how you expect all 20 horses to finish. The default scoring is as follows (you can change any of these values if you create your own group):

Correct Pick: 2 points
Correct Win: 20 points
Correct Place: 10 points
Correct Show: 5 points
Correct Last: 1 point
1 Finish Position off: 1 point
Each Finish Position off by more than 1: -0.2 points (If you pick a horse to finish 5th and it finished 7th, that is 2 positions off, so you would get 0.8 points)

Perhaps a little complicated, but I wanted something more than just Win, Place, Show. It’s so difficult to get finish positions exactly right, so I wanted some value in being close. Create your groups with whatever settings you like. If you have some suggestions to improve the default scoring, leave a comment.

ICH Olympics

I’d wanted to do something for the last Olympics but I couldn’t wrap my head around a decent idea. The Winter Games has a lot fewer events. So I started with something simple. Just pick a country in each of the 86 events. If that country wins a medal, you get points. Simple enough. No dealing with individual athletes, that would get confusing in half a second.

Olympics Picks Site – Go here to sign-up or create your own group. If you have your own group, you can set the point values for different medals. Maybe to you, silver is just one of the losers.

Make Your ICH Picks – Open to everyone, just need an ICH account.

If you have suggestions for next time around, leave them in the comments.

Some things I thought of that I’d like feedback on …
I didn’t include any sort of wager or confidence points.
The country list is the same for every event. I didn’t have time to research what countries had participants in each event.
Perhaps a subset of the most popular events would be a better option.
Maybe each country can only be selected once (or a set number of times). I’d imagine some people would just pick the USA in every event.
Deadlines before each event. This year all picks have to be in before the 1st event starts on the morning of February 12th.