The Round is Still Perfect

Chris Lemler | May 10, 2012
I want to wish everyone the best of luck on tonight's goo and the tournament goo's!!!!! The round is almost up and including me 4 others have perfect rounds. Best of Luck to everyone in this round of getting a perfect round. I usually mess up in the tourney but if I don't get a perfect round oh we.....This site is the best site to play on and will be rooting for the people who have the perfect rounds going.....Wishing the best of luck to all the players in the tourney... Also wishing Samir the best on defending his title as champion. Glad to see some of the other players like Jon Berry back in the game. Best of Luck to you all!!!!!!!! :)

Scott Hardie | May 14, 2012
I feel the same way, Chris.

Sorry, friends: I'm experiencing technical difficulties tonight with the server. Unless it's resolved in the next 2 hours, I will have no way to publish tomorrow's goo. The tournament might have to begin on Tuesday.

EDIT: Maybe I spoke too soon. Stand by...

Scott Hardie | May 14, 2012
False alarm! The goos are up on the server now, and the tournament will begin in 2 hours as scheduled. Phew!

Good luck!

Steve Dunn | May 14, 2012
So, Ryan solves two goos all season, gets matched up against me in the first round... and beats me by two seconds. Oof.

Chris Lemler | May 14, 2012
Well Steve Ryan took round 1 maybe you'll get your revenge if you have to face him again!!!!!

Aaron Shurtleff | May 14, 2012
And along comes Erik Bates to throw a (possible) monkey wrench into the works! I think his pending guess could affect some of the brackets, although I could be mistaken...

...although...how did he get a pending guess on yesterday's goo, which should have been expired?? Unless that warning has always been there and I missed it? Still too confused. Back to hiding..

Erik Bates | May 14, 2012
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Aaron Shurtleff | May 14, 2012
Oh. Yes. You're right. I was thinking it was pending for the goo on Friday. I did mention confusion.

Nothing to see here. Moving right along...

Also, Richard Slominsky is at 997 goos solved? Will the 1000 club get a new member? (I say, yes, in three days, lol)

Lori Lancaster | May 14, 2012
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Samir Mehta | May 14, 2012
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Aaron Shurtleff | May 14, 2012
Well, Aaron's mind was fuzzied by airplane trips, and when it stated that there was a pending guess for the current goo, he interpreted it as a pending guess on the Friday goo, which, if correct, would have affected the brackets (since if Erik got one more goo correct, he would have vaulted over myself and Richard Slominsky [assuming I "get" how Scott does the rankings in the case of a tie]), however, since the pending guess (now confirmed as correct, by the way) was for today's goo, we are left with me looking and feeling silly and using huge run-on sentemces for no real good reason.

Lori Lancaster | May 15, 2012
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Steve Dunn | May 15, 2012
Thanks as always for your valuable contributions, Aaron.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 15, 2012
... Matthew Preston, you are a bad bad person.

:P

Steve West | May 15, 2012
Ryan Dunn scares me. The thought of zombie Ryan Dunn made me wet myself.

Matthew Preston | May 15, 2012
What can I say Aaron? In the battle of who's cursed more, you win. So, thank you for that. Really, I got lucky. I just happened to see something the goo was in, in the last month or so. I could elaborate, but I don't want to give it away for Ronni Collins.

Scott Hardie | May 15, 2012
Very impressive playing so far! And we're just getting started.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 15, 2012
Yeah, I was the same way. I was hoping my time would be good enough, but no such luck for me. I still get a couple more chances. :D

Steve Dunn | May 16, 2012
Can a zombie win the competition? Zombie Ryan Dunn winning the whole thing makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

Scott Hardie | May 16, 2012
A zombie player can't win while being a zombie, but they can earn re-entry into the tournament and go on to win from there. The only exception is a scenario in which the zombie guesses right and everybody else guesses wrong with no extra chances remaining, because the zombie would thus earn re-entry and be the only player left.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 16, 2012
Holy crap, Justin! *humbled*

Ryan Dunn | May 16, 2012
I'm coming to get you, Barbaras! I can feel the virus bubbling up in my blood as I type from the grave. Soon...SOON my zombie ass will bite one of you right out of this competition....

Justin Woods | May 17, 2012
apparently I need Chris Lemler's ISP connection I knew who that GOO was and it took me 11 sec longer, WOW!

Chris what is your download speed up there in Granite City?

Chris Lemler | May 17, 2012
I knew the answer too!!!!! But idk about the download speed but I do know that typing class i took in High School payed off. I'm pretty fast how about you....haha :)

Steve West | May 17, 2012
Oh, man! My first solve in less than a minute and I still got destroyed by over thirty seconds. Dude!

Erik Bates | May 17, 2012
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Mike Rothstein | May 18, 2012
Hey Scott,

Something you may want to address - even though you don't see other people's results for the current goo until after you guess, on the current scores page, the list of eliminated players is updated right away and nothing is hidden, so today when I went to that page to doublecheck who I was matched against, I saw not only that it was Steve West, but that he'd already been eliminated. I don't think I would have rushed an incorrect guess if I thought I might be racing the clock, but for later goos, that could certainly be an advantage to know time isn't an issue, so you might want to change that to update the list of eliminated players the day after they've been knocked out.

Steve Dunn | May 18, 2012
Erik, well played! You're on a roll.

Me? I'm coming back as a zombie and taking it to the hizzz-ouse!!!

Scott Hardie | May 18, 2012
Great point, Mike. I wish I had thought of that. The only reason that I built that list was as a convenience to players wondering who is eligible to return as a zombie. You could also get that information by reading day one's competitors and disregarding the names that are still active, so I've gotten rid of the eliminated players list at the bottom.

What a day this was! Four tough competitors eliminated all at once. I'm impressed that Erik, Matthew, and Mike have held on to all of their extra chances, but Aaron, Joanna, and Samir won't be easy to knock out.

Each of the remaining competitors has good reason to want to win. Mike has played for six years and 1110 goos without winning yet. Aaron and Erik have kicked butt in the live game at GooCon, but have yet to win online. Joanna has won once, but it's been five years. Matthew won often in the early days of the game, but it's been more than a decade since his last online victory. Samir, our current champion, must want to win a second consecutive season and prove that he didn't just get lucky. I would be thrilled to see any of these six people triumph. :-)

I can't wait until we resume on Monday!

Steve Dunn | May 18, 2012
Zombie Steve Dunn also really wants to win.

Scott Hardie | May 18, 2012
Of course! I thought about mentioning how much the potential zombies also want to win, or how I'd actually be happy to see any player win, each for their own reason. But I hope that goes without saying.

Steve Dunn | May 18, 2012
None of us wants Zombie Ryan Dunn to win, though.

Erik Bates | May 18, 2012
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Steve West | May 18, 2012
The time posted for my wrong guess isn't visible but it felt fairly quick, like a minute or so. I found an article pretty fast and proceeded to type the name of the article writer instead of the subject of the article. Dumbass! Another perfect round ruined by a quest for speed, I coulda been a contender.

Steve Dunn | May 19, 2012
You ARE a contender. Zombie Steve West wants to win this thing, too!

Erik, I know what you mean about stress. The last round was quite an ordeal for me. I'm probably the only person who remembers how it played out, but let's just say it was a slow-motion kick in the nuts.

Steve West | May 19, 2012
Maybe a rule tweeking is in order. It seems a shame that zombie spots can be filled by players not playing. I'm all for casual players participating but it violates the spirit of the rule change designed to reduce the numbers of byes. A zombie who doesn't guess is functionally the same as a bye. Perhaps in order to get in the zombie pool you should be required to guess at the first playoff goo. Now that I'm in the zombie pool this has just occured to me.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 19, 2012
Ultra-zombie Mitchell Cumstein will take the whole enchilada. Believe it.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 19, 2012
But seriously, Erik has been putting up very very impressive times. I don't know if I get past him. I'm fresh out of people I know.

Scott Hardie | May 19, 2012
Actually, it's by design that some zombie slots might be filled by less-than-active players. I wanted the top player to still have the opportunity for a de-facto bye once in a while, as an incentive to pursue top seed throughout the regular season. This particular season, we seem to have a lot of less-than-active players and so far, few zombies, so the numbers may seem skewed right now. But there's still a better chance of the next zombie being a regular player than an infrequent player (10 to 6 by my count).

Steve West | May 19, 2012
Good enough, thanks.

Aaron Shurtleff | May 21, 2012
Ugh.

Erik Bates | May 21, 2012
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Samir Mehta | May 21, 2012
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Aaron Shurtleff | May 21, 2012
That's why I put Ugh right after I guessed. I knew it would never be strong enough. Great round, and good luck to all!

Zombie Aaron winning this tournament would be OK too. :D

Samir Mehta | May 21, 2012
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Erik Bates | May 22, 2012
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Samir Mehta | May 22, 2012
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Chris Lemler | May 22, 2012
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Scott Hardie | May 23, 2012
Amazing solve times! Well played, guys.

The site records each activation time and each guess time down to the hundredth of a second, but only as a backup to the primary time-keeping, which only records down to the second. You might remember a problem last fall where I had to standardize time records across the database. Because of that, all computation happens down to the second. In the (less and less) unlikely event of both players in the same bracket guessing in the same number of seconds, the site will show neither of them triumphant in the bracket and alert me that there's a tie. I'll then have to manually compare the backup times to see who actually guessed faster within hundredths of a second. I have no contingency plan if the two players guessed within the same hundredth of a second. :-)

Since this scenario of tied solve times seems to be becoming a matter of when and not if, maybe I should rethink that policy. It would be very easy for me to make it so that two players in the same bracket who solved in the same number of seconds would both survive to the next day, extra chances intact. I'll think about that for next season.

Steve West | May 23, 2012
I knew it would never be strong enough.
Said that she did.

I would have been in faster if I didn't second-guess...
Said that she did.

Well played, guys.
Said that she did.

You guys are killin' me.

Samir Mehta | May 23, 2012
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Aaron Shurtleff | May 23, 2012
Interesting (yet sad for me) trivia: Ray Charles was the first GOO I ever solved. It was also the first GOO Russ Wilhelm ever solved. Every time I see Russ' achievements in the GOO game, I sob thinking of what could have been. ;)

Erik Bates | May 23, 2012
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Matthew Preston | May 23, 2012
I am waaaaay out of my league here. I've never heard of today's goo, so I feel that 42s is admirable. But 20s? 17s??!! Impressive. Most impressive.

Steve Dunn | May 23, 2012
Yeah, I don't feel so bad about washing out of this competition early. There's no way I could have competed with these times, anyway.

Plus, I get to come back as a zombie and snipe the thing. Win-win.

Steve West | May 23, 2012
Brains?

Samir Mehta | May 24, 2012
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Scott Hardie | May 24, 2012
You can call me that if I get to have crazy hair like everybody else in the capital.

In the course of my daily life, whenever I hear about someone interesting, I bookmark them in my "celebrities" folder. Some of them come built-in with a good idea for a theme; others inspire a theme later when I get around to planning a ten-week season. But most of them are lonely leftovers that don't pair well with others, so they eventually wind up in the tournament or the bonus goos. Thus, there's an increased chance of finding people from current events at the end of each season. The live game at GooCon requires me to come up with hundreds of goos for a single weekend, so a lot of the names that I bookmark wind up there instead of online, especially the household names.

As for making the tournament goos, I usually only make as many as I know are needed, and wait to see what happens, in the unlikely event of everyone guessing wrong. This past weekend, I made three goos to last through today. Tonight, I need to make two more. I sometimes have a hunch that one player might fare better or worse with a particular goo's subject matter, but I never ever decide a goo based on who remains in the tournament. However, I do sometimes make later tournament goos easier or harder depending on how players fared with the early ones. (And not just in the tournament: If a particular theme turns out to be much tougher than I thought, I'll sometimes rewrite Thursday and Friday's clues before they publish, to soften them up.)

Scott Hardie | May 24, 2012
I'm curious as to how you all play, especially in the tournament. I can tell part of the story from the times of day that your guesses come in, but I'm curious if you make certain arrangements to play undistracted, if there's a reason you guess at that time of day, and so on.

Matthew Preston | May 24, 2012
This time around I've been playing on the casual, usually around lunch time at work. Last tournament I psyched myself out by making too big of a deal with it and had more than one incorrect guess. So for this one, I've just focused on getting the answer right, regardless of the time. It payed off once when I it took me nearly 15 minutes and my opponent got it wrong, but that strategy certainly isn't working further down the line. Unless I know the goo completely outright (which happens about 1 in 100 these days) I won't guess until I have found the source picture of the goo.

Erik and Samir, you two have to be putting faith in the first plausible guess you come across right? I can't do that which is why I'm not likely to win this thing (save for a slumdog-millionaire-esque finish where the goos are Eddie Vedder, Aaron Rodgers, and Hideo Kojima).

Samir Mehta | May 24, 2012
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Erik Bates | May 24, 2012
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Matthew Preston | May 24, 2012
Yeah, 50s is going to be more than enough to win today Samir. Good luck all from here on out! There is an arsenal of zombies waiting in limbo for the chance at redemption.

Erik Bates | May 24, 2012
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Scott Hardie | May 24, 2012
Crazy! Last season there would have been what, nine zombies? This time, only one, and it wound up not making any difference. Zombies are a permanent part of the game, so perhaps next season they'll have a bigger impact.

Matthew and Mike, you guys played a great tournament. It's tough to get this far and not win, but you can be proud of how well you did.

Erik and Samir, it's down to you. One of you will win on either Monday or Tuesday. First, you have to get through tomorrow's goo as fast as you can. Good luck!

Erik Bates | May 24, 2012
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Samir Mehta | May 24, 2012
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Erik Bates | May 24, 2012
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Matthew Preston | May 24, 2012
Much like the NFL teams of old, it was a different time when I won those 9 rounds. That was before all the concussions (banging my head against the desk in frustration) and bounties (offering cash to anyone that can take out the top players early on). Maybe there's a TV analyst position for me out there where I can make awful in-jokes, getting bald and fat with other goo champs of the "golden" era.

And good luck to both of you. Make it an epic finale! Go until Tuesday and tie on times so Scott has to decide on a booth review.

Samir Mehta | May 24, 2012
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Steve Dunn | May 24, 2012
Crazy! Last season there would have been what, nine zombies?

Correct. Nine.

Grumble grumble.

Samir Mehta | May 24, 2012
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Chris Lemler | May 25, 2012
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Erik Bates | May 25, 2012
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Samir Mehta | May 25, 2012
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Scott Hardie | May 26, 2012
Samir, there will be a goo on Monday. If Erik sent you a message saying that the tournament continues on Wednesday, feel free to disregard it.

Scott Hardie | May 26, 2012
Matthew's comment about the goos being some of his favorite celebrities (Eddie Vedder, Aaron Rodgers, and Hideo Kojima) reminds me of an idea that I once considered but didn't use. Ten good themes at a time aren't always easy to come up with, so one idea that I kicked around for a while was a "birthday week": Once per season, have a week of celebrities inspired by a player on the site, timed to their birthday. I would try to make some of them favorites that you've mentioned now or then, and others just be loosely connected to you, like they're from the same city. This would be a convenient way to fill a week and flatter the player, but I decided not to do it because the game is insular enough as it is. Having to know existing players well enough to answer would be one more barrier of entry for new players, and I don't need to add more of that. At GooCon, this theme idea becomes more appropriate.

Lori Lancaster | May 27, 2012
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