Add three names to The Living Room Times Hall of Eternal Glory: Mike Boyd of Raleigh, NC; Scott Fort of Warrior, AL; and Ross Binder of Minneapolis, MN — champions of the 18th annual Men’s NCAA Pool, 16th annual Women’s NCAA Pool, and 9th annual NIT Pool, respectively.

Actually, Fort’s name is not a new addition to the Hall of Eternal Glory. He won the 10th annual Women’s NCAA Pool in 2007, and tonight, he clinched the 16th annual Women’s NCAA Pool when UConn won the national championship, as he predicted. (Fort had the Huskies beating Baylor; instead, they trounced Louisville, who stunned Baylor in the Sweet 16.)

Fort finished with 331 points out of a possible 477. That’s a bit low by historical LRT women’s pool standards, indicative of the unusual volume of upsets this year, several of them by Louisville. But regardless of point total, Fort is in elite company: he is one of seven two-time LRT pool winners over the pools’ 18 years of existence (and 42 pools in all). The double champions are Jenn Castelhano (2001 women’s, 2002 men’s), Todd Stigliano (2001 women’s, 2005 women’s), Rick Boeckler (2003 women’s, 2006 women’s), Matt Kagan (2004 men’s, 2004 women’s), Gary Kirby (2007 NIT, 2008 NIT), Michael Holtsberg (2009 women’s, 2012 women’s), and now Fort (2007 women’s, 2013 women’s).

Jeb McRary (@tatsumaki4ryu) of Washington, DC finished second with 228 points. Bonnie Stone, my newspaper adviser back in the LRT pools’ Newington High School days, finished third with 321 points, capping off a massive surge from the mid-60s in the 94-person pool just last weekend. She alone predicted Louisville’s run to the title game, and gained a ton of points from that, but fell just short of making up enough ground from her early-round stumbles to win the pool. Kevin Hauschulz, who holds the record for most LRT pools competed in without winning (39 of the 42 pools I’ve done), finished 4th with 320 points. Greg Kagan, who would have won the pool if Louisville had won tonight, and Gary Atkinson tied for 5th at 316.

Rounding out the Top 10: Bob Fisch (313); my dad, Joe Loy (308); 2011 champion and daughter of the national championship-winning coach, Jenna Auriemma Stigliano (306); and my lovely wife, Becky Loy (302), who would have won if Notre Dame had beaten UConn in the semifinals Sunday. Complete women’s pool standings here.

While the women’s pool went down to the final game, the men’s pool was settled on Saturday when Michigan beat Syracuse in the second Final Four game. That clinched the pool championship for Mike Boyd, husband of Karen Torgersen (@vtktorg), who was the only contestant to correctly predict a Michigan-Louisville title game. He also got the champion right — Louisville — but that only served to increase his point total, to 331 points. That’s exactly the same as Fort’s total in the women’s pool, which is a rarity; the women’s pool champ usually scores higher than the men’s pool champ.

Jimmy Smith (@smithadventure), executive pastor at Stapleton Fellowship Church, finished second with 311 points. He would have won if Syracuse, instead of Michigan, had lost the title game to Louisville. Ginny Zak, Becky’s mother, who briefly led the pool after her mascot-based entry successfully predicted the surprise Elite Eight runs by Wichita State, Syracuse and Marquette, finished third with 307 points. Steve Vivier of Connecticut finished fourth with 300, and Lief Olsen of Denver fifth with 293.

The rest of the Top 10: Jerry Palm, the CBS bracketologist and BCS guru, and a Twitter friend of mine, finished sixth with 286 points; Sarah Craddock had 283; Robert O’Brien, 282; and Patrick Cullen, Elizabeth Styles and Kyle Cologne tied for ninth with 279. Complete men’s pool standings here.

Finally, the NIT Pool. That one, like the men’s pool, was decided in the semifinals. Ross Binder (@RossWB), an editor of the SB Nation Iowa blog Black Heart Gold Pants, clinched the pool when his Hawkeyes beat Maryland in the second semifinal, as he predicted. “Woo! ETERNAL GLORY!” he tweeted afterward, adding, “Hooray! Rampant homerism pays off at last!” Binder also correctly picked the other finalist, Baylor, though he wrongly picked Iowa to beat the Bears. But he won the pool anyway, finishing with 232 out of a possible 317 points.

Steve Vivier finished second with 212 points, making him the only contestant to finish in the Top 10 (indeed, Top 5) of two LRT pools this year (you may recall he was #4 in the men’s pool). Jeff Freeze (@bigfreezer), winner of the 2008 women’s pool, and Daniel Pilz, co-champ of the 2004 women’s pool, tied for third with 207 points. Aaron Kinser (@AaronK_MN) finished fifth with 203 points. Freeze would have won the pool if Maryland had beaten Iowa in that decisive semifinal; Kinser would have won the pool if, in the prior semifinal, BYU had beaten Baylor, and had gone on to defeat either Iowa or Maryland in the title game.

Again rounding out the Top 10: Lauren Fowler (@ndlauren), 198 points; Michael Watkins, 194; Andrew Long, 187; Aaron Woodward, 185; and Andy Hunter, 183. Complete NIT pool standings here.

It’s that time of year again! Everybody in the pools!

My NCAA and NIT pools are, as always, free to enter. There is no monetary or tangible prize* — just a chance at bragging rights (or, as I like to say, eternal glory).

Complete rules here. Entry links below. (Also, “like” the pools on Facebook!) Good luck!

Men’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
Live Standings
Live Game Scoreboard
Scoring system: 4-7-11-17-24-33.
View everyone’s brackets: PDF file here

Women’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
Live Standings
Live Game Scoreboard
Scoring system: 4-7-11-17-24-33.
View everyone’s brackets: PDF file here

NIT Pool:
Live Standings
Live Game Scoreboard
Scoring system: 7-10-15-20-25.
View everyone’s brackets: PDF file here

**NOTE: In a late rule change, I have decided NOT TO COUNT the Tuesday & Wednesday “First Four” games. If you think a “First Four” participant will win in the Round of 64 or beyond, pick the alternative pair (e.g., “MTSU/StMry” or “BSU/LaSal”) and you will get credit if EITHER team ultimately wins a game(s) in the main bracket. Contestants who entered the pool before this rule change will not be disadvantaged, as their First Four picks will automatically be changed to the alternative pair. That said, if anyone wishes to change their picks, they can, as always, do so, as long as their revised bracket is received by 12:20pm Eastern Time on Thursday. I will assume that the last bracket I receive from you before the deadline is the one you intend to use, and I will delete all earlier brackets.

*I’ve finally decided to give up the ghost on promising t-shirts that I haven’t gotten around to actually buying for the champs in several years (sorry guys). Besides, by eliminating the tangible prize, I believe NCAA athletes are now eligible to compete if they wish — at least, if the rules about such things haven’t changed since 2002, when I was a USC tutor working with student-athletes, and thus had to deal with that issue. (Please consult your compliance department if this applies to you, though. I don’t know what I’m talking about!) [UPDATE: Confirmed by @IrishCompliance!]

Scott Woods (@gswoods) of Jonesboro, Arkansas won the 9th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool last night, taking over first place when Ang Lee won a surprise Best Director award for “Life of Pi,” and clinching victory when “Argo” won Best Picture.

Woods got 72 out of a possible 80 points, missing on just 3 categories: he had Robert De Niro winning Best Supporting Actor (6 points) instead of Christoph Waltz; he picked “Anna Karenina” for Best Production Design (1 point) instead of “Lincoln”; and he had “The Hobbit” winning Best Makeup (1 point) instead of “Les Misérables.” He picked the other 21 Oscars correctly.

But until the Best Director category, Woods was largely “off the radar,” thanks to his error in predicting the first award of the night, Best Supporting Actor. That early mistake meant he had to gradually climb the standings, and until Best Director, was still lurking several spots behind the duo who appeared destined for a wire-to-wire win: Vicki Lopez and Chris Aemisegger.

Lopez, a friend of Becky’s & mine from college at USC, and Aemisegger, my 1L law school roommate from Notre Dame, had identical picks, and led the pool all night until Best Director. They would have finished as co-champions if Stephen Spielberg had won for “Lincoln,” as expected, and the rest of the results had gone the same way that they did.

Lopez’s fortunes are nearly always a major pool storyline, as her numerous close calls, near-wins and heartbreaking defeats have become the stuff of LRT Oscar Pool legend over the years. She fell just short of Oscar Pool victory because of plausible but incorrect Best Picture picks in 2005 (she picked The Aviator; Million Dollar Baby won), 2006 (she picked Brokeback Mountain; Crash won) and 2011 (she picked The Social Network; The King’s Speech won). She also finished second in 2010, narrowly losing out because of incorrect screenplay picks.

Lopez was one of the primary participants in the Oscars live chat all night, and her share of the lead was a subject of much discussion. “Hello again, Vicki! Are you feeling lucky this year?” Kristin Farleigh asked her at the beginning of the chat. “I was until my favorite driver won the Daytona 500,” Lopez replied. “Then I knew I had no shot tonight :)”

But, after Lopez got the first four awards right, including Waltz’s upset, Farleigh wrote: “Whoa, Vicki, this may be your year!” I chimed in: “Or Vicki is setting herself up perfectly for another crushing late defeat,” Brandon Minich added: “This is a great start for Vicki. Buuuut we’ve seen this before.”

Six awards in, as she moved out of the pack and into a two-tie with Aemisegger, Lopez wrote, “Ok, keeping my expectations low is getting harder… damn you, Brendan! I swore I was going to not care this year!”

Later in the night, as the major awards neared and Lopez remained atop the leaderboard, Farleigh wrote, “Vicki, I hope you win.” Lopez responded: “Aww, thanks. Now it’ll be super awkward when I don’t.” Becky chimed in, “I hope Vicki wins too. But we all know it won’t happen!” “Thanks, Becky. Always keeping it real,” Lopez replied.

As it turned out, Becky, Brandon and I were right. In 2006, Lopez had too much faith in Ang Lee, the director of that year’s Best Picture upset victim, Brokeback Mountain. This year, she had too little faith in him.

“WHAT!” Lopez exclaimed in the chat when Lee’s victory for Best Director was announced, dropping her from first place to mathematically eliminated. “I’m actually shocked.”

She added: “I hate everyone, just FYI.” (Heh.) But, a few minutes later, she was more philosophical: “I’m fine with not winning. As I said earlier, I knew it wouldn’t happen after the 48 won Daytona.”

Lee’s win also eliminated me, Brendan Loy, from what had briefly looked like a surprisingly plausible path to victory: I needed Emmanuelle Riva to win Best Actress for “Amour,” which some handicappers believed was a plausible upset possibility, and then the as-expected results for the rest of the way. I realized this scenario existed about 30 seconds before Lee’s win was announced, causing my hopes of a first-ever win in my own Oscar Pool to be raised and then almost immediately dashed.

Taking my place on the Emmanuelle Riva bandwagon was defending champion @juleslalaland, who, like Woods, correctly picked Ang Lee’s win, and like me, incorrectly picked Riva. She would have taken the lead from Woods, and ultimately would have won, if Riva had won Best Actress. But instead, the favored Jennifer Lawrence won for “Silver Linings Playbook,” as Woods predicted.

“I think I just won @brendanloy’s Oscar pool!” Woods tweeted moments after Lawrence’s win.

Not quite. The defending champ’s mathematical elimination left Woods with one remaining plausible challenger: Kristin Farleigh winner of the 3rd annual Oscar Pool in 2007 (under her maiden name of Kristin West). Farleigh — who, like Lopez, was participating in the chat all night — needed “Lincoln” to pull the upset and win Best Picture.

“GO LINCOLN!!!!!!!!!!!” Farleigh wrote in the live chat as the show neared its climax. “I can taste it….SO … CLOSE,” she added as First Lady Michelle Obama appeared remotely to present the Best Picture award, stoking speculation that the White House role might presage a “Lincoln” victory. “Best president, Best picture!”

If “Lincoln” had won, the 15-point boost for getting the Best Picture winner right would have vaulted Farleigh from a sixth-place tie to an Oscar Pool win. But favored “Argo” won instead, dropping Farleigh all the way to 35th place, and giving Woods the victory.

“So I lost @brendanloy’s Electoral College contest on a tiebreaker and won the Oscar pool. Bring on March Madness!” Woods tweeted after clinching the title.

Woods, who started following me on Twitter during Hurricane Isaac last August, did indeed lose the 3rd quadrennial LRT Electoral College Contest on a tiebreaker: he had one of six perfect maps in the presidential race, but was one House seat too low in predicting the Democrats’ House gains, the fifth tiebreaker.

In this contest, his 72 points is tied for second-most all time. Jeff Freeze’s 2010 performance remains the gold standard: 74 points out of a possible 80 (though Freeze actually missed twice as many picks, getting six 1-point categories wrong). Also getting 72 points were Lisa Velte in 2008 (eight 1-point categories wrong) and Chris McLemore in 2007 (six 1-point categories and one 2-point category).

Diana Gonzales (@trojanchick99) finished second with 71 points. Like those prior 70+ point winners, and unlike Woods, Gonzales got all of the “big six” categories right, but erred on a number of lesser categories (including a best screenplay Oscar, worth 4 points each).

Aemisegger and Lopez, who had appeared destined for victory until Ang Lee’s upset, finished tied for third with 68 points apiece. Linda Adriaans was fifth with 64 points. Here are the complete final standings:

Continue reading »

The 85th annual Academy Awards start at 6:30 PM Mountain Time. Becky’s and my live-blog / live-chat / live-snark will officially begin at 6:00 PM (though you can start chatting earlier if you like).

The chat is right here, in this blog post. To participate, you’ll need to log in below via Twitter, Facebook or OpenID.

The chat will also (if Cover It Live’s tweet import function is working properly) auto-import any tweets with the hashtag #LRToscars, as well as any tweets by, or mentioning, Becky or me.)

I will attempt to live-update Oscar Pool results throughout the evening, though you can expect a bit of a lag around the girls’ bedtimes. Also, there will undoubtedly be some sort of OMG SPREADSHEET #PANIC!!! early in the night, rendering initial results unreliable. That’s really just part of the tradition at this point.

Have fun!

P.S. There was talk last year about doing an Oscars Drinking Game this year in the chat. For various reasons, I regret to announce that I will not be organizing or participating in any such revelry. However, if other Oscar live-chatters would like to do a drinking game, and if someone would like to propose rules, I will be happy to post them in the chat. :) Photos of yourself drunkenly watching the Oscars are also encouraged. Bqhatevwr.

I’m pretty late in setting this up (though not quite as late as last year), but I just realized, OMG, the Oscars are on Sunday! … which means it’s time to sign up for the 9th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool!

The deadline to enter is Sunday at 5:30 PM Mountain Time. Entering the pool is, of course, free. The prize, as per usual: eternal glory!

As always, contestants are urged to enter using their full name, a Twitter handle, or some other readily recognizable partial name or nickname/pseudonym. After all, what’s the point of “bragging rights” if I don’t know who you are?

The scoring system, once again, is 12 points for Best Picture, 9 apiece for the directing and lead acting categories, 6 each for the supporting acting categories, 4 each for the screenplay categories, 2 each for documentary feature, animated feature, foreign film, cinematography and original score, and 1 per award for everything else.

Becky and I will most likely host a “live blog” and “live chat” Sunday night here on the blog. The chat has a reputation of being as entertaining as the actual show, if not moreso… plus, I will post live, updated Oscar Pool results throughout the show. So, bookmark this page and check back on Sunday!

[UPDATE: I created a Facebook Event Page for the Live Chat. Everyone is welcome!]

Anyway, get in the pool!!!

P.S. Some Oscar-prediction resources:
• Roger Ebert’s predictions (major categories only)
• NYT Carpetbagger predictions (major categories only)
• Nate Silver’s predictions (major categories only)
• Huffington Post Oscar Predictions
• Doc’s Sports Oscars odds
• EasyOdds Oscars betting
• GoldDerby summary of experts’ predictions

Ryan Morgan, a.k.a. @rpm002, a Wisconsin fan and 2006 Drake alum, clinched victory in the 8th annual Living Room Times Bowl Pick ‘em Contest when Arkansas State beat Kent State in the GoDaddy.com Bowl last night.

Regardless of the outcome of tonight’s Notre Dame-Alabama BCS championship game, Morgan will finish tied in points with Sam Mann (@mannsg28), and will defeat Mann on the first tiebreaker: “Total number of games picked correctly (regardless of how many points each game is worth).” Morgan and Mann both presently have 41 points out of a possible 56, but Morgan’s win-loss record is 26-8 while Mann’s is 24-10.

Both contestants picked Alabama tonight, and the closest Notre Dame pickers are too far behind to catch them. Morgan and Mann will thus finish tied for first place with either 41 points or 45 points, and Morgan will win the tiebreaker regardless of the ND-Bama outcome.

The championship game will determine how the rest of the leaderboard looks, however. Presently, it looks like this: Russ Caplin is one point behind the leaders with 40 points, Steven Smith is next with 39, followed by Stephen Peroz, Zach Bloxham and Mike Wiser, all with 38 points but with records of 24-10, 23-11 and 22-12, respectively. Rounding out the Top 10, with 37 points apiece, are Nathan Wurtzel and Scotty Stout (both 22-12) and Paul Zak (21-13). The entire Top 10 picked Alabama, so if the Crimson Tide win, the order will remain the same, with everyone having 4 additional points.

However, if Notre Dame wins, the final Top 10 will look like this instead: Morgan first and Mann second with 41 points each, and Caplin next with 40, but then Andy Sorensen and Ross Lancaster (22-13) and Rachel Dulitz (21-14) joining the Top 6 with 40 points each. Defending champ Nyghtewynd (23-12) and Rick Boeckler (22-13) would be 7th and 8th, respectively, with 39 points, ahead of Smith (39 pts, 22-11) and Peroz (38 pts, 24-9).

Also finishing with 38 points if the Irish win, but finishing below Peroz on tiebreakers, would be Brendan Loy (11th), Bloxham (12th), Alison Vargas (13th), Mike Wiser (14th), Matt Wiser and Jeff Freeze (T-15th), Mike Brown and Derek McDonald (T-17th). Double Domer Lisa Velte would finish 19th with 37 points, as Wurtzel and Stout tumble from an 8th-place tie to a 20th-place tie.

GO IRISH!!! :)

Tonight’s GoDaddy.com Bowl between Sun Belt champion Arkansas State and MAC runner-up Kent State will decide the winner of the 8th annual Living Room Times Bowl Pick ‘em Contest — regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s BCS national championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama.

If Kent State wins, Sam Mann (@mannsg28) will win the LRT contest. If Arkansas State wins, Ryan Morgan (@rpm002) will prevail by tying Mann in points and winning on a tiebreaker.

Although the GoDaddy Bowl is worth just 1 point, versus the national title game’s 4 points, the latter is irrelevant to the contest’s outcome because everyone within striking distance of the leaders picked Alabama. The highest-ranked Notre Dame pickers are Andy Sorensen and Rachel Dulitz, both 5 points behind current leader Mann. Dulitz, Sorensen and Mann all picked Kent State tonight, so the closest Dulitz and Sorensen can get to first place is 1 point behind.

Dulitz had a chance to win until last night, but she needed Pittsburgh to best Ole Miss in the BBVA Compass Bowl to stay alive. Mississippi’s win mathematically eliminated Dulitz, and made tonight’s bowl the de facto championship game of the Pick ‘em Contest.

Above: Me at LSU-North Texas with Ross Lancaster, and at Washington-Colorado with David Kreutz.

It’s college football bowl season, and that means it’s time for the 8th annual Living Room Times Bowl Pick ‘em Contest! The contest is now underway.

If you entered my 2010 or 2011 Bowl Pick ‘em contest(s), you can log in with the OfficeFootballPool.com username & password that you created previously. (If you forgot your username and password, click here.)

[NOTE: If you tweet, and your Pick 'em contest username is not your Twitter handle, you are encouraged to change your username to your Twitter handle.]

If you didn’t enter my 2010 or 2011 contest(s), then after clicking here, you’ll need to click “NEW USER.” Next, you’ll be prompted to create a “Screen Name” — again, I encourage anyone who tweets to use their Twitter handle — create a Password, and enter your E-mail Address, “First Name,” “Last Name,” and (again) “Twitter Handle.”

You are not required to put your full, real name in the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields (though it’s encouraged), but please give me some way of knowing who you are — what I want to avoid is another situation where I have no idea who the winner is!

As always, the contest is free, and the winner gets acclaim, publicity, and eternal glory here on the blog and on Twitter — but no monetary prize. :) All picks are due by Saturday, December 15 at 11am Mountain Time (10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern), when the New Mexico Bowl kicks off. You can change your picks at any time before the deadline.

You pick the winners of each bowl game “straight up” (NOT against the spread, though the spread is shown for informational purposes only). There are no “confidence points”; instead, each correct pick is worth a predetermined number of points. A grand total of 60 points are possible, broken down as follows:

• 4 points: BCS National Championship Game
• 3 points each: All other BCS games
• 2 points each: All non-BCS bowls from December 29 through January 4
• 1 point each: All other bowls

In the event of a tie in point totals, tiebreakers are as follows:

1. Total # of games picked correctly (regardless of how many points each game is worth)
2. Correct pick of the BCS Championship Game winner
3. Closest to the combined total number of points in BCS Championship Game

So, there you go. Again, sign up here! Have fun! Good luck! Go Irish! :)

P.S. You can also enter by clicking here and then manually entering the Pool ID (67297) and the Pool Entry Code (firekiffin). USC fans may want to use that method just for the satisfaction of typing “firekiffin.” :)

P.P.S. Speaking of “eternal glory“… here are the past winners:

2005-06: Brian Dupuis
2006-07: Ben Sloniker
2007-08: Seth Carmack
2008-09: Amy Booth
2009-10: Doug Mataconis
2010-11: Randy Styles
2011-12: @Nyghtewynd
2012-13: TBD. It could be you! Enter now!

[NOTE: In addition to entering the contest, please bookmark my Liveblog, Livechat & Live Results page, then come back Tuesday for election results and contest results!]

With less than three weeks until the presidential election, the polls are open for my quadrennial blog contest to see who can best predict the Electoral College outcomes! It’s time to start playing with the red & blue map, like Loyette and Loyacita:

In 2004, Mike Wiser had a perfect map; in 2008, Kevin Curran missed only Missouri, edging out the competition because he correctly predicted Obama’s surprise win in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district.

Who will join Wiser and Curran and earn eternal glory (and possibly a CafePress mug of your electoral map) this year? Will it be you?

Click here to enter the contest!

The entry deadline is Election Eve — Monday, November 5 — at 7:00 PM Mountain Time (9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific). Feel free to enter early, and then re-enter later if you change your mind; I will assume that the last entry I receive is the final one, and will discard any earlier entries, unless you tell me otherwise. If you have any questions, or just want to make a minor change to your entry, e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com.

Contest Rules:

* Each contestants will receive between 0 and 538 points, depending on how close they come to a “perfect map.” For each correctly-predicted state/district, the contestant receives as many points as the state/district has electoral votes. So, for instance, it’s better to get both Iowa (6) and Nevada (6) wrong, and everything else right, than to get just Ohio (18) wrong. The map that missed only IA & NV would get 526 points; the map that missed only OH, 520.

* I will abide by the final popular-vote result in each state/district as certified by the relevant governing authority in that jurisdiction; “faithless electors” will not be taken into account. A winner will be declared as soon as the state-by-state election results are sufficiently complete that such a declaration is possible, whether that’s on election night or weeks later. I will use my best judgment to fairly determine the operative winner for contest purposes in the event of any disputed state results.

* There is no requirement that the contest winner must necessarily have predicted the correct overall winner in the election (although that is a tiebreaker, as you’ll see). The object of the game is to predict each state correctly. If you only get, say, New Hampshire wrong, even if that one error happens to change the national winner, you’ll still beat someone who had the right national winner but picked Florida wrong, for instance.

* Tiebreakers are similar to, but slightly different from, last time around. They are as follows, in order:

1. In the event of a tie in points, a contestant who correctly predicts the overall national electoral vote winner (again, going by the popular-vote results in each state, ignoring “faithless electors”) prevails over a contestant who predicts the wrong national winner. NOTE: For purposes of this rule, a 269-269 map is regarded as predicting an Romney victory, and a 269-269 result is considered a Romney victory (because the Republicans have a mortal lock on a majority of the House delegations in more than 25 states, so Romney would become president in any 269-269 scenario, unless a number of House Republicans defect and vote for Obama, which seems inconceivable to me).

2. Among still-tied contestants, whoever gets the fewest number of states wrong prevails. So, for instance, all other things being equal, it’s better to get Wisconsin wrong (10 EVs) than to get both Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (4) wrong. For purposes of this rule, the District of Columbia counts as a “state.” As for Maine and Nebraska, if a contestant gets the at-large result right, but a congressional district or two wrong — or vice-versa — this will be counted as a “half-state” wrong.

3. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting President Obama’s electoral vote total prevails. This rule rewards “offsetting” errors when two maps otherwise contain the same number of mistakes. So, for instance, suppose Obama wins Iowa (6) and Wisconsin (10), but Romney wins Nevada (6). Now support Map #1 gets Iowa and Wisconsin wrong, giving Romney both states. Map #2 gets Wisconsin wrong, giving it to Romney, and also gets Nevada wrong, giving it to Obama. Both maps are off by 16 EVs, and by 2 states. But Map #1 gives Obama 16 fewer electoral votes than he actually received, while Map #2 comes within 4 electoral votes of Obama’s actual total. Map #2 therefore wins this tiebreaker.

4. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting how many Senate seats the Republicans will win, prevails. The result will be based on election results only; any post-election party switches (or surprise Angus King caucusing decisions) will not be considered.

5. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting how many House seats the Republicans will win, prevails. Again, the result will be based on election results only; any post-election party switches will not be considered.

6. Among still-tied contestants, anyone who correctly predicted the state with the closest popular-vote margin (in percentage terms) defeats anyone who failed to do so.

7. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting Obama’s national popular-vote margin of victory/defeat, prevails. (All Romney & Obama popular-vote predictions are rounded to the nearest tenth of percent.)

8. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting Gary Johnson’s national popular-vote total, prevails. (All Johnson popular-vote predictions are rounded to the nearest hundredth of percent.)

9. Among still-tied contestants, whoever comes closer, in absolute value terms, to predicting Obama’s raw vote total in Colorado, prevails. (Contestants are encouraged to give an exact total, down to the individual vote, in order to prevent ties.)

10. In the unlikely event that a tie remains, whoever entered the contest earlier, prevails. (Any changes to one’s prediction resets their prediction time to the date and time of the last change.)

Again, click here to enter! And then check back here, and on my Twitter feed, for contest results on Election Night. [UPDATE: Liveblog link!]

Good luck!

P.S. A big hat tip to Unlikely Voter, whose nifty, easy-to-use, Maine-and-Nebraska-including, informative-URL-encoding electoral prediction map I used to power my contest.

By popular demand (by which I mean Becky said I should do it), I’ve set up a Live Chat for tonight’s Academy Awards after all.

More on that in a second, but first, join my 8th annual Oscar Pool!

The ABC broadcast starts at 5:00 PM Mountain Time, the actual awards at 5:30 PM, but you can start chatting whenever you want. To participate, you’ll need to log in below via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?) or OpenID.

(The chat will also auto-import tweets with the hashtag #LRToscars, as well as any tweets by, or mentioning, Becky or me.)

Whether I live-update Oscar Pool results remains to be seen.

I’ve very, very late to this… so late that it’s already Oscar Day on the East Coast… but it’s time to (quickly!) sign up for the 8th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool!

Frankly, I completely forgot until late in the week that this was coming up, and then I was too busy to get it set up, until tonight. I had almost given up on doing a pool at all… until I started getting Twitter and Facebook inquiries… and then Becky convinced me that “you can’t just not have an Oscar Pool!”

Anyway, the deadline to enter is Sunday at 5:30 PM Mountain Time. Entering the pool is, of course, free. The prize, as per usual: eternal glory!

As always, contestants are urged to enter using their full name, or alternatively, a Twitter handle, or other readily recognizable partial name or nickname/pseudonym. After all, what’s the point of “bragging rights” if I don’t know who you are?

The scoring system, once again, is 12 points for Best Picture, 9 apiece for the directing and lead acting categories, 6 each for the supporting acting categories, 4 each for the screenplay categories, 2 each for documentary feature, animated feature, foreign film, cinematography and original score, and 1 per award for everything else.

I’m unlikely to do a “liveblog” this year [LIVE CHAT HERE!], but if nothing else I will post results here next week. So: get in the pool!

P.S. Some Oscar-prediction resources:
• Roger Ebert’s predictions
• GoldDerby summary of experts’ predictions
• Doc’s Sports Oscars odds
• EasyOdds Oscars betting

Dude… it’s PajamasMedia.com.

I apologize to my LRT readers for having so little coverage of Hurricane Irene here, while I was blogging up a storm (pun intended) over at my Pajamas Media site, Weather Nerd. Ideally, I would have done more partial cross-posting — understandably, PJM doesn’t let me do full cross-posts, since they pay me for exclusive content, but I can do partial cross-posts — but I was just so busy that I didn’t have the time. With Hurricane Katrina, I could basically take a week off of life, skip my classes, cut out sleep, and blog, blog, blog. Now I’ve got a job and three kids, so it was a little trickier.

Anyway, I haven’t yet seen PJM’s stats for Weather Nerd’s traffic, but I’m told the numbers were “phenomenal.” I’m curious if I topped my Katrina record of 34,278 visitors in a day. I know there was a major impact on my number of Twitter followers, which had sloooowly climbed to 1,600 over the course of my three years on Twitter — then skyrocketed over the weekend to more than 2,200. Here’s a look at my Twitter stats, showing my total number of followers (dark orange line) and number of tweets per day (light orange bars) over the last three months:

And to think, now all those new followers will now have to be indoctrinated into the cult of #PANIC, not to mention Karl Benson WAC jokes. :)

I also suspect that my Saturday-night tidal gauge post, which was simultaneously Instalanched and @fivethirtyeight’d, may have inadvertently contributed to the disruption of NOAA’s servers, causing all of the tidal gauges to simultaneously go offline for about an hour. I don’t know whether this is true, but the correlation was pretty strong, inspiring me to tweet: “Where were you when Brendan Loy and Nate Silver broke NOAA? #SuggestedAlanJacksonSongs”

(If it was my fault… um, sorry, NOAA!)

Obviously, outside the blogosphere and twittersphere, my coverage didn’t cause anything like the level of attention I got during Hurricane Katrina. But I did get mentioned by Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch on Fox Business News yesterday, as you can see in the video clip at the top of this post. Watch the whole thing if you dare, but be warned, it’s mostly absurd, conspiratorial, Obama-bashing, right-wing nonsense. Though Lindsey Piegza’s comments about what the media did “once we found out that the storm wasn’t as strong” are true, as I wrote over at Weather Nerd:

Was Irene overhyped? Well, yes and no. … As I wrote in my post about “misconceptions,” the mere fact that a worst-case scenario doesn’t occur is hardly proof that it should never have been considered a possibility, or that precautions taken against such a scenario were therefore unwarranted. That’s totally illogical. I’m sure NOAA officials and others would love to have access to the 20/20 Hindsight Computer Model that some commentators seem to possess, but absent that, I believe it was completely justified and necessary to evacuate the folks who were evacuated, given the uncertainties in the forecast at the time decisions had to be made (specifically with regard to the storm surge). It’s the nature of the beast, given the current limits of our forecasting ability, that most “alarms” will be “false alarms.” It’s simply impossible to know with certainty what a storm will do at the time when evacuation decisions must be made, so we have no choice but to “prepare for the worst,” knowing full well that, in most cases and in most places, the worst will not happen. Thus, the fact of a “false alarm,” without more, is not evidence of improper “hype.”

Yet overhype certainly exists, not so much in the forecasts or the precautions, but in the media coverage. “Preparation for the worst-case scenario makes sense,” writes the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden, “and could have saved hundreds during Katrina. But the worst-case scenario was largely portrayed as inevitable.” That’s a big problem in the early stages of hurricane coverage: the tendency to filter out the uncertainties, and treat the worst-case possibilities as probabilities or near-certainties. This, in turn, feeds into a cycle of self-perpetuating hype, which at some point seems to pass a “point of no return,” after which any walk-back of the doomsday talk is seen as irresponsibly advising people to “let their guard down” — not to mention hurting ratings. That helps cause what I view as the primary problem, which I’ve observed many times over the years: the MSM’s failure to adjust the tone and substance of the coverage once it has become apparent that the worst-case scenario(s), despite having previously been realistic possibilities, have now become unrealistic. In other words, they fail to dial down the hype a notch when the hype, once reasonable, is clearly no longer justified. I tweeted Friday morning about this, stating: “Media must be careful today. Fine line b/w preventing complacency & overhyping a weakened Irene (which breeds cynicism and…complacency). Ideally, you communicate that Irene is a big deal that people should take seriously, but no longer likely to be an apocalyptic hellstorm. But that’s hard to do in practice, especially when MSM weather coverage generally has two settings: 1. #Ignore. 2. #OMGApocalypticHellstorm!” …

This pattern is dangerous, because it can breed both complacency and arrogance — the latter exemplified by Anne Thompson’s comment on the NBC Nightly News that New Yorkers had gained their “swagger” back because “New York took the best that Irene could give, and made it through.” That statement might make sense, if Irene had given New York anything close to “the best [it] could give.” But Irene didn’t do that. It’s absolutely critical to understand that this was nowhere near the worst-case scenario for NYC & environs, thanks to Irene’s limited strength. That scenario will occur come to pass someday; it just wasn’t today, thank goodness. But my fear now is that, when the eventual day of reckoning comes, folks won’t take it seriously because “they said that about Irene too.” Complacency caused by media overhype can kill, just as surely as complacency caused by people “letting their guard down” due to underhype. Finding the proper balance is very tricky, and impossible to do perfectly — but the media certainly needs to do better.

By the way, on the subject of “hype,” Irene’s death toll is now 40, the fourth-worst in the U.S. since 1980, according to Nate Silver. And its economic damage could end up being between $14 billion and $26 billion, which would rank somehwere between fourth and eighth since 1980 in inflation-adjusted terms. So it’s not like this was a non-event (as folks in Vermont and the Catskills will tell you).

Anyway… on to the next worst-case scenario! Tropical Storm Katia — bearer of the name that replaced “Katrina,” which was of course retired from the rotating six-year name list — has formed off the African coast, and is expected to steadily strengthen, eventually becoming a major hurricane. Some computer models have shown an eventual threat to the U.S. East Coast (we’re talking about something in the 10 to 14 day range, maybe around the weekend of 9/11), but the latest model runs, via Ryan Maue, seem to imply recurvature out to sea:

Bottom line, it’s way, way, way too early to tell what Katia will do. But I’ll be watching. :) And I’ll just make this highly speculative, totally unfounded, irresponsible comment: if the storm that inherited Katrina’s spot on the hurricane name list hits New York and/or Washington on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I may conclude that Michele Bachmann was right. :P

With basketball over, football far away, and Becky heading into her third trimester, I’ve decided to take a break from Twitter. This eliminates, at least for the moment, the need for an extra or double-wide blog sidebar showing my latest tweets. So we’re back to the old 835-pixel-wide layout. Low-res and mobile users, rejoice! (Apropos of which, if this page looks screwy on your browser, reload it. If it still looks screwy, load the stylesheet, hit reload on it, then come back to this page and click reload again.)

Meanwhile, for posterity’s sake, after the jump is the entire “March Madness Live” live-tweet window that’s been in my sidebar for the last month.

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If the blog looks all screwy this morning, with a big blank space in between the blog content and a tiny right sidebar, view my stylesheet and hit reload on your browser, then come back to this page and again click reload. That should fix it.

What I’ve done is create a massive right sidebar for ScribbleLive-fueled live coverage (largely Twitter-based, but also archived for posterity) of March Madness-related events, starting with tonight’s Montana @ Northern Colorado Big Sky championship game (7pm MST, 9pm EST, on ESPN2), which I’ll be at in person. Bally is stoked.

Also note the new masthead, from Hinkle Fieldhouse during BracketBusters 2007. (I used a different masthead from the same game last March.)

Randy Styles, who became a father Saturday morning, earned a perhaps slightly less momentous (heh) but still notable achievement Sunday night, as he won his second consecutive Living Room Times contest — following up his win in the LRT Bowl Pick ‘em Contest with a victory in the LRT Oscar Pool.

Better watch out for Randy in the upcoming NCAA and NIT pools. :)

Styles, a resident of South Bend, Indiana, submitted his Oscar picks Friday night at 11:26 PM Eastern Time, apparently just hours before heading to the hospital for his daughter’s birth. He and his wife Elizabeth welcomed an 8 pound, 8 ounce baby girl at 9:43 AM Saturday.

On Sunday night, the proud papa finished with 67 out of a possible 80 points in the Oscar Pool, to edge David Kreutz and pool administrator Brendan Loy, who had 66 points each. Amid the sleep deprivation of his first full day of fatherhood, Styles stopped by the LRT liveblog about two-thirds through the show and wrote, “Hope I win like Bowl Pickem. Wife and I just had a baby girl.8 lbs.8 oz. … We are both really happy!”

Styles got just 4 awards out of 24 wrong. His mistakes were: Best Director, worth 9 points (he had David Fincher for The Social Network; Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech won); Best Cinematography, worth 2 points (he had True Grit; Inception won); Best Art Direction, worth 1 point (he had The King’s Speech; Alice in Wonderland won); and Best Animated Short, worth 1 point (he had The Gruffalo; The Long Thing won).

If not for Styles’s misjudgment in the Best Director category, it would have been the most dominant performance in Living Room Times Oscar Pool history, as he got almost all of the “minor” categories right.

Meanwhile, Vicki Lopez and Jeff Vaca, who would have been pool co-champions if “The Social Network” had won Best Picture, dropped all the way to 14th place when “The King’s Speech” won instead. It’s the third time in seven years that Lopez has been denied victory by a plausible but incorrect Best Picture pick, and at least the fourth time she has been a single award away from winning. (She finished second last year, thanks to mistaken picks in the screenplay categories.)

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