BallHype Blog

Now that the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins have closed out their respective conference championships, we’re ready to launch our first Stanley Cup Picks Contest on BallHype.

Pick the winner of each game and answer other questions related to the Finals, and you could win an autographed Zach Parise jersey from Versus. Yes, we know he’s not playing in the Finals this year. Is it enough to say that he played last year? And he’s recently been named an alternate captain of the 2008 U.S. Men’s National Team in the 72nd annual International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship. All in all, a darn good prize for answering 18 questions correctly.

You have until the start of Game 1 to make or edit your picks. In the event of a tie, the person who finished their picks first, wins.

Make your picks now.

UPDATE: Congratulations, tbuchalski, you’re the big winner, thanks to the incredibly prescient (or lucky) pick that the Detroit Redwings would outscore the Detroit Tigers at least four times on the days when they both played.

Basketball fans, welcome to the most anticipated postseason in years. Despite the absence of last year’s Cinderella team, the 2008 NBA playoffs figure to be a shootout, especially in the Western Conference, where nearly every team has a realistic shot at the Finals. With such a wide open race, we’re excited to re-launch our 2008 NBA Playoffs Pick’em Bracket!

You make the picks, you set the odds. Just before tipoff of Game 1, the odds will be frozen based on the number of people entering the contest and the picks they’ve made. At the end we’ll tally up the points and award the winner an iPod touch. For the uninitiated, it’s like an iPhone but without the phone. What’s left you ask? Movies, music, photos, and WiFi internet for email, maps, and more.

Two quick reminders before you go stampeding for your brackets… First, you can run this contest with your friends by creating a BallHype Group. Just select this as one of the games you want us to track in your group’s settings. Second, in the event of a tie, the winner will be the person with the higher NBA playoffs game picks score – so don’t forget to make your weekly game picks.

Fill out your 2008 NBA Playoffs Bracket.

BallHype’s weekly Golden Picks Contest has a new sponsor: WhatIfSports.com. Each week, the person with the best game picks score will receive a $15 gift certificate good for one free season of sports simulation games on WhatIfSports.com.

By the way, if you are a Yankees fan and have spent many a drunken night convincing anyone who would listen that the 1927 Yankees were better than the 2007 Red Sox, you would be right (according to their SimMatchup tool, which is free and not part of the prize but pretty cool nonetheless).

So grease the mouse wheel and make your game picks. Best to get in shape now for March Madness, which will be soon upon us (recruit your office pool early and watch for the bracket contest on BallHype).

We have a new contest up over at ShowHype for the Academy Awards. See how many of the major categories you can pick correctly. If you watch the broadcast, it’ll make the 4 hours feel more like 2, and if you don’t, you may be all the more delightfully surprised the following morning to find out you’ve won.

The rules are essentially the same as the Pop Quizzes. Correct picks count more if they are upsets (e.g., Michael Clayton for Best Picture); for more, read an example of the scoring methodology.

The lucky winner will receive a $100 gift certificate to Fandango. (Puppets not included.) To motivate you all to get your significant other, coworkers, and in-laws to play, we’ll also give a $50 Fandango gift certificate to the administrator of the ShowHype Group with the most Oscar-picking participants.

Not included in this contest are the technical Oscars. I was too bored even reading the list of categories. Also omitted, although not due to lack of interest: an Oscar night drinking game.

If you’ve been wondering when we were going to get off our bums and put out a ShowHype contest, you have your answer. Tonight we launched Pop Quiz, which asks such weighty questions as “Will National Treasure: Book of Secrets outperform the original National Treasure weekend gross of $35M?”

As with Game Picks, the odds are set by the contest participants. If one person predicts P.S. I Love You to open big this weekend and everyone else goes with the crowd and votes Sweeney Todd or National Treasure, the Hilary Swank fan is in for a big payday if Johnny and Nic don’t deliver.

A couple of differences between ShowHype’s Pop Quiz and BallHype’s Game Picks…

1. Unlike sports, we don’t have regularly scheduled contests between teams in entertainment (Walk Hard vs. Sweeney Todd aside). So we’ll identify interesting match-ups ourselves on at least a weekly basis. Some of them will be straightforward box office rankings, but we’ll also quiz you on things like the next person to get voted off Survivor or which Kardashian daughter will be the first to marry then divorce Joe Francis.

2. Not all questions are worth the same number of points. There’s a Pop Quiz Factor at the end of each question, which will serve as the multiplier when we calculate the score. (Details on scoring in the FAQ.) This gives us the artistic freedom to assign bonus points to a particular question or amp up the wattage on an awards show ballot.

Hard to believe, but NFL season is already here. It’s only pre-season, you say? Perhaps, but you can get a jump start on the regular season by filling out your picks for Ballhype’s latest contest, 17 Games.

Slightly more complicated than our Golden Picks contests (which includes both NFL and college game picks), but way simpler and less likely to result in divorce or bankruptcy than betting with a bookie, 17 Games just requires that you pick one team per week to win. You receive or lose points based on how well or poorly your team performed against the spread. Dude or dudette at the end of the regular season with the most points wins the official NFL game day ball.

What I like about 17 Games… I used to be good at math, but I now get headaches if forced to calculate odds. Nice thing here is that you don’t have to pretend to do mental math. Just look at the spread, figure out who you think has the potential to beat it, and make your pick.

We have some fun stuff planned for this contest, but I’ll let our new guest columnist have the honors in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, check out 17 Games, tell your friends, and make some picks.

But if you put it on top of a pretty vase and turned the lights down low, the new NBA ball kind of looks like the championship trophy that was just won by the Spurs tonight. And with the end of the Finals series that swept the Cavs but few others off their feet, we are nevertheless happy to announce the winner of Ballhype’s 2007 NBA Playoffs Pick’em Contest is chicocat21. The prize if you recall, is the official ball of the NBA that was unveiled with some fanfare and met with great resistance.

chicocat21 beat out 553 other Ballhype members to win the contest. Mr. or Ms. chicocat21, congratulations! You changed your bracket only once, to switch the Eastern Conference winners from the Cavs to the Pistons (your first instinct on this one was right, not that it mattered), and you picked the entire Western Conference correctly from the get-go. We’re impressed, and hope you come back to give some of the regulars in the weekly game picks a run for their t-shirt.

On Monday night, Joski got his fifth consecutive Golden Picks Award. We remarked on his achievement back when he won the fourth, so we won’t do too much whoopin’ it up today. (And yes, I realize this should have been written earlier in the week but … well, I didn’t get it done.)

However, we do have from the master himself, a deceptively simple strategy for winning:

1) teams are rarely more than 3-2 underdogs

2) all things being equal, the home team will tend to win

Why would Joski share his ancient wisdom with the rest of us? He is sick of wearing Ballhype tshirts every day. And he acknowledged that “it’ll make it a lot more challenging (and fun) for everyone if there aren’t big gaps in the odds which folks can exploit.” Note that this week he’s only in eighth place on the leaderboard, so make of that what you will.

But Joski has won his 4th straight Golden Picks Contest. I’m not at liberty to divulge his secret sauce (perhaps he will throw out some tips in the comments) but it’s no small feat. During the four weeks that Joski has dominated the leaderboard, 12,426 game picks have been made. Interestingly enough, the beginning of his streak was May 1st, the night of Game 5 between the Warriors and the Mavs. Joski correctly picked the Mavs.

You can’t really hate on him either, because he’s the Mother Teresa of game pickers. After taking home two Ballhype Tshirts, he’s offered up the prize to the next naked contestant in line. This week, that’s chone. So if you are wondering whether it’s worth making picks if Joski is in the running, you actually have a good shot at getting a shirt if you break the top 5. Course, I can’t guarantee his generosity (or his picks) will continue to hold. He may decide next week to keep his shirt to give his dad for Father’s Day. Not a bad idea, by the way, if you haven’t done your shopping yet.