It is week eight of football season, something that would normally catch me by surprise as I wake up from a seven-month-long baseball-induced coma at the end of October. But this year, an early Red Sox elimination and an anti-climatic World Series helped me locate the couch on Sunday afternoon a lot sooner than usual. Consequently, I have found myself a little more wrapped up in the goings-on of the National Football League - enough to have discovered a growing underground betting phenomenon called the suicide league.
Apparently, "suicide leagues" or "last man standing pools" have been around for quite a while, but thanks to the global accessibility of the Internet they have been growing in size and popularity in recent years. The mechanics are simple: you and some buddies get together and throw in some cash for a pot, and every week each player picks one team to win. If your team wins, you stay in the pool; if your team loses, you are eliminated for the season. The "last man standing" gets it all.
Sounds pretty easy, right? How hard could it possibly be to pick one winner every week? More difficult than you would think. To begin with, you cannot pick the same team twice. So all the Pats fans of the world cannot just ride New England into the postseason and pick up the check at the door.
Never mind winning; starting one of these pools is not as simple as just finding a group of five or six, or even 15, buddies to go in with - you need at least 30 to even hope to have someone "go the distance." And where do you find all these players? Enter the Internet. Thanks to e-mail and instant communication, what used to be a simple office pool has now grown into a global phenomenon of people across the country and around the world placing bets. And organizationally, a game with such elementary mechanics can be worked out for huge numbers of players in a simple spreadsheet, with weekly e-mail updates. A global office pool is born.
One of these groups, aptly named "Last Man Standing," has been around for 11 years. A brainchild of a few guys in a New York City tavern, this pool has grown from 58 people at its inception to 4,961 at the start of this year's football season. The buy-in? $50, half of which goes to charity, the other half of which goes to the winner, which means that for 2005 there's $124,025 going to the last to get eliminated. Dear Diary, Jackpot.
The head of this particular pool, known to members only as "the Zookeeper," said the league includes players not only from all over the United States, but also from Canada, the United Kingdom and even soldiers in Iraq. In order to run the group, the Zookeeper gets weekly picks from over 150 "sponsors" and then spends around 15 to 20 hours a week updating a master spreadsheet and sending e-mails to keep the "animals happy in their cages." The pool has spread almost entirely by word of mouth and does not have any Web site, as the Zookeeper is afraid it will "change the nature of what we do."
So with a pool of almost 5,000 people, how many are still standing after the halfway mark? Only 1,193, less than a quarter of the original number. But for most of the players, the $50 investment was well worth it. If history holds true, most of the players will re-enter next year and even bring a few more buddies on board.
The Zookeeper is already out of it this year, having never made it past week seven in 11 years of playing. For those remaining, there is a larger and larger contingent rooting for upsets and the underdog, which is really what makes a pool like this so much fun. And on an altruistic note, Last Man Standing has given almost $500,000 to charitable organizations, all picked by members of the pool - some groups as large as the American Red Cross, American Cancer Society and Salvation Army, others as small as local schools or families. "If you find a creative way to have money go to places where it needs to go to, people are more than willing," the Zookeeper said.
There have been smaller "tributary" groups, trickling into existence from the Last Man Standing pool. Usually these groups are formed for local charity purposes, with a "just for fun" mindset. Given the direction next year's Red Sox seem to be heading, maybe you'll find me soliciting on the Main Green in time for the start of the football season for Brown's own Last Man Standing League. All proceeds to benefit the Brown Daily Herald Libation Fund. I can't think of a better cause than that.
Kate Klonick '06 does what she can to keep the animals happy in their cages.
