Easy Come, Easy Go

A few weeks back my buddy Tim and I entered a March Madness basketball pool. This in itself isn't all that newsworthy because we enter a basketball pool every year. When I was younger and more willing to fill my head and time with meaningless scores and stats I felt the $5 or $20 entry fee was but a small investment toward greater reward. Of course, this was never the case.

Now that I'm older, busier, and likely won't watch a single college basketball game all year it would serve to reason my chances of winning are even slimmer than before. When I look at all those schools in the brackets I tend to remember them for how good they were eight or nine years ago and pick accordingly. Or else I just keep picking the teams who are seeded highest so I can hope to finish in a 50-way tie with all the other mindless knuckleheads filling out a bracket.

This year I chose a handful of upsets here and there but kept most of the #1 seeds in line to play for the championship. I wasn't sure who the best of the best was supposed to be but took a random guess - the Kentucky Wildcats. It turns out they were something like 33-2 this year and the hands-down favorite to win it all.  A lucky guess except that about 60% of America chose them to win which made my chances of winning the pool even worse. On my second bracket I tabbed Ohio State who, it turns out, had been playing really badly over the past few weeks and very few people were picking. Again, the chances were slim.

But, alas, the stars have aligned. For all the ignorance I brought to the two brackets I filled out I am currently in 8th and 16th place. Out of 432. Kentucky is already in the final and Ohio State is playing Kansas in the other semi-final. If Kansas wins tonight and then falls to the Wildcats on Monday I'll finish 3rd. If Ohio State wins tonight and then goes on to beat the Wildcats on Monday I'll come in 5th. Gambling is illegal so let's just say 3rd place is good enough to win 1,000 pats on the back from the 429 people who finished behind me while 5th place is worth 600 congratulatory high-fives. Of course, if neither of those scenarios play out I'll have accomplished nothing more than being strung along for an extra week or two.

Of course, I'd gladly trade this for one of those three winning lottery tickets that will share more than $600 million dollars. We never buy lottery tickets so our chances of splitting that jackpot weren't all that spectacular except that Tim buys tickets each week and has long promised to give us 10% should he ever win. During that time he and I have come up with some great ideas as to what we'd do with that much money. Some, like building a "major league" whiffle ball park for ourselves to play in, were realistic while others, like buying out Gary Sheffield's Yankee contract and making him go back and play for the small-market Milwaukee Brewers,  were a little more far-fetched.

For this week's lotto jackpot of more than a half-billion dollars Tim bought not one, but five tickets. The extra four bucks increased his chances of winning from about 170,000,000 to 1 to a far more likely 34,000,000 to 1. Turns out it didn't help much. He was a loser for the 518th time in a row. So I guess the whiffle ball park will have to wait at least another week. Until then...

Go KENTUCKY!