Great Satan Rules

RULES for the GREAT SATAN pool:

—You will pick 15 specific Winter Olympic events (ie, “biathlon 12.5km pursuit men,” not just “biathlon”), and choose the country you believe will win that event. You may choose each country only once. You may not choose America. You MUST choose South Korea once. The research is on you.

—You will rank these 15 picks by priority. The one you are most confident about should be ranked 15, and the one you feel least secure about should be 1.

—You should submit by typing your picks into gmail, single-spaced, from 15 down to 1. Do not paste from Word or Excel or anywhere else, because this makes it a huge pain to enter in the spreadsheet. One of you will do this, and we will harass you to the death. Picks should look like this:

15. Snowball Fighting, 12-Hour Melee: Luxembourg
14. Ice Fishing, Bare-Handed: Mongolia
13. Snow Angels, Blindfolded: Brazil
…
1. Erotic 4-person luge, nude: Italy

—There are 15 disciplines in the Winter Games. In making your 15 picks, you must use 13 of those disciplines.

—If you use all 15 disciplines and never once get Satan’d, you earn the DANTE’S JOURNEY bonus of 15 points.

—If you choose to double up in a discipline (ie, two speed skating events), and you get Satan’d in either event, your penalty doubles for that one event (no extra points for succeeding). If you triple up in a discipline, penalty values triple

Scoring: If your country wins gold, you win 4x your priority value. Silver: 2x. Bronze: 1x. Nothing: 0 points. No bonus points if your country has multiple podium placements.

—You may ONLY pick events in which an American is participating. Luckily, the U.S. has athletes in 97 of 102 events, excluding these five:

Freestyle Skiing – Men’s Ski Cross
Freestyle Skiing – Women’s Ski Cross
Long-Track Speed Skating – Men’s 10,000m
Short-Track Speed Skating – Women’s 3,000m Relay
Snowboarding – Women’s Parallel Giant Slalom

THE GREAT SATAN CLAUSE: If America beats your country and makes the medal stand, you just got Satan’d, son. Not only do you lose any points for that event: You lose 1x the value of your pick if America takes bronze, 2x if they take silver, 4x if they take gold. If neither your country or America makes the medal stand, it’s just zero points flat even if America beats you.

THE ROCKET MAN CLAUSE: You must pick South Korea as one of your 15 countries, but if they don’t medal in the discipline you pick, this displeases DEAR LEADER Kim Jong-Un, who has unified with South Korea for these Olympics. He doesn’t have the arsenal of the Great Satan, but he can certainly stage a devastating one-time attack. Should South Korea fail to medal in your discipline, you lose 4x the priority pick.

THE DANGEROUS DONALD EJECTION SPECTACULAR: If you get Rocket Man’d and Satan’d at the same time, you are eliminated from the pool. (Note: In a situation where your South Korean pick wins a medal but gets beat on the podium by an American, this is a Great Satan, but not a Rocket Man, and therefore not a Dangerous Donald.)