NCAA March Madness eQuatloo Auction Challenge Contest!

By
Greg Diamond
– March 19, 2018Posted in: Fresh Juice, Orange Juice Blog, sports

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I’ve long thought that we conduct our March Madness pools the wrong way.  Rather than giving points for guessing every game, we should hold auctions to pick the winner.  Orange Juice Blog (OJB”) can’t — or at least won’t, so long as I’m its lawyer — try to put together a real auction where real money changes hands.  But we will try something else and see how it works.

Don’t just sit there in a slump — get up and compete!

WHO CAN PLAY?  Anyone who has ever commented or published on OJB, with the exclusion of cowardly anonymous saboteurs.  If you want to comment here using a real name that connects to a real email from which you can reply to email asking you if you are you, then you’re in.

WHEN DOES IT START?  Tomorrow, March 20, 12:00:01 a.m. (by our site’s clock.)

You can submit your entry for today … NOW!

HOW DO YOU PLAY?  Good question!

(1) Every one of you is issued 1000 eQuatloos per day between March 20 and March 31 — 12,000 eQuatloos in all.  You can spend those eQuatloos on any of the teams remaining in the tournament.  You can spread them out across all 16 teams now remaining, or you can focus all of your quatloos on one team.

(2) Each day, prior to the start of any game played on that day, you comment here on this item to say how you have decided to spend your eQuatloos.  YOU MAY NOT BID THE SAME AMOUNT AS ANYONE ELSE HAS BID ON THAT PARTICULAR TEAM.  If you do so, your bid will automatically be reduced to the highest non-duplicative number.  (Obviously, therefore, there is a benefit to posting at 12:00:01 a.m., if you’re up that late. )  If two people bid the same amount on the same team at the same time, the second one appearing will get a mulligan and can bid again.

But all I said is that I thought that your green hair would go nicer with green skin!

(3) The eQuatloos should be spent on the day they are issued, because they lose 20% of their remaining value every day if left unspent.  But they can still be spent, and if you were going to spend them on Virginia or Cal State Fullerton, you are probably better off having hoarded them a bit.  (But you’re still probably going to lose if that’s your strategy.)

(4) Your eQuatloos ARE NOT FUNGIBLE; they can be spent on only one thing, that being your attempt to “own” (for bragging rights purposes) the winner of the NCAA Basketball Championship.  At the end of the tournament, your EQuatloos are automatically exchanged for boosts to your self-esteem if you are the winner.

(5) Only one person can “own” each team remaining in play at any given moment.  That means that if you are putting all of your eggs in one basket, such as Virginia, you may end up chasing someone one eQuatloo ahead of you the entire time.  (That’s what losing auctions is about, folks.)  But if everyone follows that strategy, there will be a lot of unclaimed teams out there for others to pounce upon.  As your dungeon master — um, I mean auction host — I will be following the “value purchasing” strategy just to keep the rest of you honest(ish.)  I will also not be investing in a teach until at least dawn.

Any disputes will be resolved by our judges.

Here are your choices, in this screenshot swiped from Google.  Thanks, Google!

So, alphabetically by state, just to make us West Coasters hurt even more than we already do, your choices for investment are:

Florida State (FL)
Loyola (IL)
Purdue (IN)
Kansas (KS)
Kansas State (KS)
Kentucky (KY)
Michigan (MI)
Nevada (NV)
Syracuse (NY)
Duke (NC)
Villanova (PA)
Clemson (SC)
Texas A&M (TX)
Texas Tech (TX)
Gonzaga (WA)
West Virginia (WV)

At a minute past midnight tonight you can spend your first 1000 eQuatloos.  You can spend them all in one place, or you can spend 63 on eight teams and 62 on the other eight, or anywhere in between.

UMBC did WHAT???!!!

Good luck — and don’t choke!

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)