Funny story

This story has nothing to do with Yahtzee. I'm only going to correct obvious spelling errors tonight. I'm tired and meant to tell this story last week. 

There's a local bar/restaurant that runs contests on its Facebook pages for prizes. A lot of times it's restaurant gift cards, occasionally it's tickets to sporting events. The contest usually involves guessing the score of an upcoming sporting event, and sometimes something else. In a baseball game it might be predict the score, winning team and one Minnesota Twins player to get a  hit. 

It's not easy to win. First of all, picking the final score of a sporting event is rare, and then you have to pick the correct team to win. To top it off, you may have to name a player on the team that will meet whatever the criteria is for that contest. I've picked the score correct a few times, but often more than one person does, especially when it involves baseball or hockey. They'll have a drawing if there's more than one correct answer, and sometimes I've had the right score, but picked the wrong player for the final question. I did win a $20 gift certificate to the restaurant once for being correct but not winning the random drawing. They don't always have consolation prizes, but occasionally they do, and I won one. 

So last Thursday they had a simple pick the winner/score contest for the first night of a big four-game series between the hometown Twins and Cleveland Indians. Knowing most people will pick the Twins, I picked Cleveland. I figured if I was right, there'd be less people who might pick the same score as I did. I was going to pick a final score of 7-4, but I was inexplicably moved to type 7-5 as the final score. 

It was 6-5 in the ninth inning and Cleveland tacked on a run, making it 7-5. The Twins had one last inning to at least tie the score. They put runners on, threatening to score at least a run, but the Indians got out of it without allowing a run, and the final was 7-5 Cleveland. I had picked the correct score! 

Often there are 500+ entries for these contests, all entered in the comments of a Facebook post. For this contest there were only about 300, so my odds were already a bit better. I saw several people picked a final score of 7-5, but they picked the Twins to win. Unfortunately two people had picked a score of Cleveland 7, Twins 5. So I had a one-in-three chance of winning the prize, two "good" seats to any remaining Twins game. 

They don't announce the winner after the game, typically, they do it when they get around to it. When they post the winning announcement, they do it in the contest thread, so I get an alert that they've announced a winner. I went to see the winning entry and learned that some woman was the random winner. I was so disappointed, but for this contest I was getting a $20 gift certificate, so at least my correct guess wasn't for nothing. 

Since Facebook was showing "relevant" replies to the contest thread, mine was immediately under the contest winner's announcement. And the winning woman's entry was listed immediately below mine. Then I noticed this: 

See how it shows "edited" after it denotes she typed her pick 22h earlier? Yeah, I noticed that, too. And I happen to know you can see the edits that were made by clicking on the "edited" denotation. So, did Carrie edit her pick because she misspelled Indians? Here's what her edit history showed me:

It looks like Carrie made a lot of changes to her picks in a short period of time. And, funny, her picks reflected the score at different points during the late innings of the game. This was about noon on Friday, and it was a long game on Thursday night, lasting until nearly 11 p.m., as I was watching the final inning on my phone after 10:30 p.m., hoping my 7-5 prediction would hold up. And what time would it have been 14 hours earlier? Sometime between 10 and 11 p.m.

So I privately messaged the restaurant and sent them unedited screen shots, noting it appeared she changed her score multiple times, which they've policed in the past, because people have tried to get away with doing that in order to win. The Facebook admin for the restaurant noted that s/he usually looks for that, but obviously missed it. (My theory, s/he scrolled through the entries on a mobile phone, looking for any entry with the correct score, and as soon as s/he found one, that person was declared the winner.) 

After pointing out obvious cheating by Carrie, whose Facebook profile seems to show her to be a married mother of three teens and pre-teens who have enough money to afford plenty of life's luxuries, the restaurant told me I could have a pair of tickets to any game I wanted. 

I didn't note on the Facebook thread for the contest that the winner appeared to have cheated, and I told the restaurant they could handle it however they saw fit. I was told by the admin that s/he didn't want to call out Carrie on the page, and I didn't care that I wasn't declared a winner to the Facebook world. I can only hope that within a couple of hours of telling Carrie she won, they revoked her prize for cheating, but I don't know, and never will. 

So I'm a winner, and Carrie is a poor example of sportsmanship to her children, although they'll never know it.