I thought I'd devote a couple minutes to talk about some things that are going on with the game in general, to get a sense of folks' thoughts on certain things.

A couple people have asked me over the last three weeks when we were going to have another tournament. I'm all for the idea of doing it again, but I'm exploring the idea of an alternative format this time. There area couple options here:

1) We go back to the old way (i.e. you win to get a spot in the finals, and that's all).

2) We do it World Cup style, with group stages and all. This sounds prohibitively complicated, but might be interesting.

3) Single elimination with seeded pairings, a la the NCAA tournament.

4) The format a lot of bar poker tournaments use. Basically, how this works is you play every week (or so). If you win you still get a spot in the finals, but you can also qualify for the finals by accumulating points every week. Like, first place is 10 points, second 8, third 6, and so on (with whatever numbers are appropriate) and at the end every team with X or more points also qualifies.

I'm up for whatever people like, or if someone has some other idea I'm all for that.

Next up is the new wrinkle in the overall game, whereby any team that wins three weeks in a row will get to choose a speed round topic. There are a couple things to remember about this.

For starters, it must be substantially the same team that wins. One or two changes here and there are okay, but I would say that you need to have more than 50% of the same people on every team that wins. If you bring 5 different friends every week, no dice.

Second, your choice of speed round topic must still pass muster with me as not ridiculous. You all know how the speed rounds generally go, and I've tried to keep them from being obscenely esoteric. Those are your guidelines, should you choose to follow them. I'm never going to say "you can't do that, pick something else." I will accept any topic.

Remember that you ARE making a deal with the devil here, though. If you DO attempt to choose something stupid and absurd (like, say, I don't know, "shoe designers") you may find that your choice will backfire on you in unexpected and terrible ways...

JLK