Super Pool

I watched the Super Bowl this year with a handful of friends and a peculiar contented certainty that it was costing me $5.

There are a lot of sports fans at my work. They decided to have an office Super Bowl pool whose mechanics were fairly interesting (at least to me, since I’d never heard of it before—apparently it’s pretty common since everyone else seemed to have heard of it). The way it worked was there were 100 squares on a 10×10 grid. It cost $5 for a square and once the grid was full of names, they randomly assigned numbers from 0-9 to each column and row. The columns were assigned to one team and the rows to the other.

At the end of each quarter in the game, the scores would have the tens digit removed and if the numbers matched the resulting scores, the person with the intersecting square would win $100. There was also a $100 reward for the final score, separate from the 4th Quarter result.

At first my inclination was to pass on it. But two things convinced me to go for it: One was that 1:100 odds at a 20x return are pretty decent odds. But since I don’t put much stock in trying to play odds (1:100 is still only 1%) what really convinced me was that the guy who started the pool needed just a few more squares filled to make it happen and was running out of candidates so rather than be That Guy Who Ruined the Pool By Being a Total Stick-In-The-Mud, I decided to chip in. Losing $5 wasn’t going to kill me, at least not outright.

When the randomized numbers came back I had Seattle: 0 and Pittsburgh: 1 which wasn’t as bad as my cube-mates 2 and 5 (2s are really tough to come by since it takes unusual scoring like four field goals or at least one missed extra point and fives are even worse… 35 points is the best hope for a 5 match and that’s pretty high scoring for a Super Bowl), but still wasn’t like 3-7 or 7-4. I decided my only hope would be 21-10 Pittsburgh, which sounded like a 3rd quarter score to me and a fairly unlikely one at that.

So I went to watch the game at HB‘s place fully convinced that I wasn’t going to win.

Now if you watched the game and remember the final score, you know how this is going to end. But what happened was that I kept waiting for my chance to pass: You know, for Seattle to score that third time or for Pittsburgh to break it wide open and pass over the three-TD mark. The game kept going and I stayed in it.

As it came down to the fourth quarter I finally started to let my self hope… just a tiny bit. Most of my efforts to quell it came from the innate knowledge bourne of thousands of “Instant Win” games and hundreds of mocking jokes at the expense of beleaugered Lotto players that no one turns $5 into $200 doing nothing and does it with 1:100 odds. No one.

When the score finally got to my winning point (Steelers 21, Seahawks 10), there were nearly seven minutes left in the game. My hopes sank almost all the way. Surely someone was going to score at least something in that time. But the Steelers plugged away at the ground, killing the clock. They didn’t break free to seal the deal, they didn’t try anything tricky and pass it around, they just wasted time. Then the Seahawks got the ball and I tried not to care whether they scored or not. Of course they were going to score… at least once.

When the pass to the two yard line was caught I threw up my hands in resignation. That was it; a brief moment of hope for glory gone the way of every other chance to win something—anything—my whole life. It was fine. It was comfortable.

Then the flag landed. Penalty. Play called back. I kind of stopped watching the game for a few minutes after that—I just sort of phased out. I wasn’t refilled with hope sprung anew or anything, it was like my brain couldn’t handle that not being the expected crush of inevitable letdown. How could this still be a possibility?

I vaguely caught the Seahawks bumbling their clock management; it wasn’t until the Steelers got the ball back with three seconds left that I tuned back in and it kind of struck me that it had actually come down my way. I instantly decided that I must have misread the grid sheet and I actually had Seahawks at 1 and the Steelers at 0. It was a coping mechanism.

But in the end I was right and when I got to work Monday morning I got a bunch of good-natured envy and an envelope stuffed with bills. $195 profit. I went CD shopping yesterday; no other reason than that I had money I didn’t plan on having and hardly ever let myself go nuts like that. Eight used CDs later and a bit of cash bookmarked for a forthcoming release I still have half the money left.

What’s funny about the whole thing is that I had just days ago offered to give my bi-weekly discretionary fund ($100) to Nikki since she used hers all up. It wasn’t a big thing, I didn’t really think about it. I heard her saying she was having trouble deciding what to do since she didn’t really want to spend all her money and have none left over, so I offered to give her mine. I didn’t have anything special planned for it, she had uses for it so I told her she could have it. As I regarded the folded stack of $20s in my wallet exactly equalling the amount I had given up I wondered about balance. Perhaps there was some universal truth hidden here. Maybe there was something to learn.

Or maybe I should send the extra $100 to the Seattle Seahawks. Thanks for being such a bunch of losers, chumps!

I’ve learned nothing.

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