The game is already well established, several seasons running now. You guys always do well!! The Sunderland ‘Black Cat Chat’ forum (and Hakuna Matata to be precise) does the real hard mathematical donkey work all during the season, whilst I am the representative from the Reading’s Royals Rendezvous forum and do more the ‘public relations’ type stuff as many already know. We are going to be your points of reference for all this coming season.
Some 750 of you have already participated in previous seasons. But for newcomers, what is this game? It’s dead easy! You simply guess ONCE (now!) what you think will be the final league positions for the Premier League 2015-16 (that means placing all teams, in order from 1st to 20th), leave them on this thread, and then sit back and enjoy! Nothing more!!
BUT … THIS SEASON THE GAME WILL BE SPECIFICALLY A FORUM EVENT, NOT AN INDIVIDUAL PLAYER EVENT, OK?! That means don’t give rash selections like some did before in the hope for personal glory; now it’s a team average event, so putting the relegated three as the two Manchesters plus Chelsea is hardly going to get a healthy prospect for your forum…
But this is an ideal way to keep fans from many different clubs all together… so where forums have an entry of a minimum of five people we will make a ‘board average’, thus you’ll be able to see how your forum copes against many of the others across the land. It is set against an single initial average entry taken from your forum guesses, and this average will be the forum entry. Before we have the first update each forum entry will be made clear on every participating forum. Five different member entries as a minimum is the requirement (no maximum!), this so as to avoid ‘fluke’ results which might distort the good guess-work averaged out by forums with large numbers.
This game will initially take you a couple of minutes, and then enjoy without having to make updates at all, all season. Right, below are the current 20 Premier teams in alphabetical order – BEST IDEA is simply copy these onto your PC and re-arrange them in your finishing order come the end of the 2015-16 season. The Sunderland computer handles them in an alphabetical order initially so please help us with accurate spelling, as laid out below:
Arsenal
Aston Villa (please don’t write only ‘Villa’!!)
Bournemouth
Chelsea
Crystal Palace (please don’t write only ‘Palace’!!)
Everton
Leicester City
Liverpool
Manchester City
Manchester United
Newcastle United
Norwich City
Southampton
Stoke City
Sunderland
Swansea City
Tottenham Hotspur (please don’t write only ‘Spurs’!!)
Watford
West Bromwich Albion
West Ham United
Try not to give any nicknames – putting the ‘Hammers’ or ‘Gunners’ or ‘Tigers’ or ‘Toffees’ or more disrespectful rival names might understandably be a good laugh – but it is simply a headache for us at our end so … Please!!
According to your choices your forum will score points, and better still, very few, points. And how do you sparingly score those points?
Scoring is as follows:
For each team your forum scores one point for each place away from its predicted position. Example - if you predict Sunderland to finish 9th and they finish 9th, you score 0 points (that’s really excellent predicting). If they finish 13th you score 4 points or if they finish 7th you score 2 points. Therefore, the nearer you get to the exact position and have less points mounting up the better. I will endeavour to make updates at least at the beginning of every month during the season out of interest, and usually fortnightly, scoring points from the ‘real’ live premier table at each moment, but all leaderboards during the season are given for interest. So IMPORTANT! - The big winners are the forums at the end of the season who have LEAST points after the final game has been played.
The table positions won’t change position so much in the later stages of the season so … how can we maintain interest to the end you might be thinking?! Well, we have MONTHLY rewards for those in the top positions! That’s points rewards for the highest positions at the end of every month (calculating from the REAL table on the 30th/31st - except when part-way through a weekend programme in which case we will wait to a maximum of Monday night for completed weekend programme to calculate progress reports).
Here's the idea:
1st spot - take off 3 bonus points from score, so score dips even lower /
2nd - take off 2 bonus points /
3rd - take off 1 bonus point
Bonus Points are for the most successful - Positions 1 to 3 – and includes tied points so there may well be far more than 3 teams involved. Their position for the deduction will be based on their (true) teams' score, not taking any previous deductions into account which you do keep all season of course on lowering your overall total.
* LAST SEASON
How did the best forums do 2014-15? Here goes!
FORUM Honorary Gold Medal – Shared
• DCFC Fans Derby County
• Toffee Talk Everton
FORUM Honorary Silver Medal –
• United Lounge Manchester United
FORUM Honorary Bronze Medal – shared
• Foxes Talk Leicester City
• Black Cat Chat Sunderland
FORUM Honorary Diploma of Honour I
• Baggies Zone West Bromwich Albion
FORUM Honorary Diploma of Honour II – shared
• Not 606 Hull Board Hull City
• Toon Forum Newcastle United ***** WELL DONE *****
During the past two seasons these forums have participated in one way or another:
Barnsley – Talk of the Tarn
Blackburn – Rovers Talk
Blackpool – Back Henry Street
Bournemouth - CourtOffside
Brighton – North Stand Chat
Burnley – The Longside
Cardiff – Cardiff City Forum
Crystal Palace – The Holmesdale
Derby – DCFC Fans
Doncaster – Viking Chat
Everton – Toffee Talk
Fulham – Friends of Fulham
Hemel Hempstead – Tudor Talk
Hull – Not 606 Hull Board
Leeds – LUFC Talk
Leeds – Dirty Leeds
Leicester – Foxes Talk
Man City – MCFC Forum
Man Utd – United Lounge
Newcastle – Toon Forum
Norwich – Not 606 Norwich Board
Nottm Forest – The A Block
Peterborough – Posh Forum
QPR – Not 606 QPR Board
Reading – Royals Rendezvous
Sunderland – Black Cat Chat
Swansea – Planet Swans
Tottenham – Tottenham Hotspur Unofficial Fans Forum
Watford – WFC Forums
West Brom – Baggies Zone
West Ham – Cockney Boys
Wigan – This Northern Soul
(please excuse me if I have missed anyone out!)
But we’ll also have some new ones this season !
Note -
To avoid wums/trolls (or ‘jealous’ away fans) then what you see as any disruptive entry (e.g. an impossible order which would negatively help the forum) will not be included in the average entry at the request of any moderator/admin (by PM or on the thread itself), so if you see something strange please advise your mod team!
IMPORTANT –
ENTRIES IN BY 7TH AUGUST 2015 – late entries are not accepted, for we would not be able to add them to an average forum entry once the first Saturday matches have kicked off …!
Have fun …
daib0
