2015 World Crokinole Championship Fantasy Pool

With under 2 weeks to go until the World Championships you may only want to focus on preparing your game for the world’s best. But have you taken time to think about how the day will shape up? Who’s going to come out of nowhere? Who’s going to falter? And most importantly, who’s going to win the 17th World Championship?

Do you want to finally prove once and for all your prediction prowess? Are you afraid that your prognostications will go unheard despite being astonishingly accurate?

Well why not take your hand at picking a team for the first ever Crokinole Fantasy Pool?

The rules are simple: 

1. Pick the best 8 player team consisting of 2 players from Group A, 2 players from Group B, 2 from Group C, and 2 from Group D.

2. The higher up your players finish, the more points your team earns.

3. Whoever has the team with the most points will win the coveted title of Crokinole Fantasy Champion, and bragging rights until their title is challenged next year.

The separation into 4 different groups is designed to spread out the talent, so the winning team will require a strong showing from many different players, who outperform their expectations.

I initially thought about drafting the groups subjectively by my own choosing, but then thought it should probably have some objective basis. As such, the groups are determined based on the current CrokinoleCentre Rankings.

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D
(The top 6 CrokinoleCentre Ranked players.)	(Rankings from 7-20)	(Rankings from 21-40)	You may pick any player not listed in Groups A, B, or C.
Justin Slater	Jason Beierling	Ron Reesor	Brian Henry
Ray Beierling	Matt Brown	Brian Simpson	Kyle Vaillancourt
Nathan Walsh	Roy Campbell	Reuben Jong	Rob Mader
Fred Slater	Tom Johnston	Ab Leitch	Ed Ripley
Brian Cook	Clare Kuepfer	Alex Protas	Barry Kiggins
Jon Conrad	Eric Miltenburg	Chris Gorsline	Ralph Hargrave
	John Harvey	Dale Henry	Abijah Jong
	Dave Brown	Tony Snyder	Kevin Bechtel
	Rex Johnston	Peter Carter	Raymond Kappes
	Howard Martin	Cathy Kuepfer	Bob Mader
	Robert Bonnett	Paul Brubacher	Jeremy Gunn
	Roger Vaillancourt	Gloria Walsh	Beverly Vaillancourt
	Peter Tarle	Ray Haymes	John Lichty
	Louis Gauthier	Jody Good	Kevin Brooks
		Nathan Jongsma	Bob Jones
		Linda Irvine	Curt Currie
		Quin Erzinger	Ewen MacPhail
		Ron Haymes	Richard Guptill
		Adrian Conradi	Daryl MacDonald
		Michael Hughes	David Younker

Note: For Group D the players listed above are ranked 41 to 60, but you are also permitted to pick any player not included in any of the other groups.

This is where a little inside information can make the difference. If you know of a real ringer coming in, or you want to take a chance, then select that player for your team.

As an example team, for the 2014 World Championships, the ideal team would have included

Group A - Brian Cook (1st) and Justin Slater (2nd)

Group B - Matt Brown (4th) and John Harvey (7th)

Group C - Ray Haymes (13th) and Tony Snyder (15th)

Group D - Ezra Yantzi (10th) and Kevin Bechtel (14th)

This would have met all conditions for player choices (2 from each group) and put all 8 players in the top 15. Notice the choice of Ezra Jantzi would have been an “off the board” pick as he is not listed in Group D.

Points will be awarded to each member of a team as follows:

1st - 100

2nd - 90

3rd - 85

4th - 80

5th-8th - 70

9th-12th - 65

13th-16th - 60

17th-20th - 50

21st-25th - 45

26th-30th - 40

31st-35th - 35

36th-40th - 30

41st-45th - 25

46th-50th - 20

51st-60th - 15

61st-70th - 10

>71st - 5

The ideal 2014 team would have earned:

100 (Cook) + 90 (Slater) + 80 (Brown) + 70 (Harvey) + 65 (Yantzi) + 60 (Haymes) + 60 (Bechtel) + 60 (Snyder) = 585 points

Enter your team roster with a comment below. Entries will be accepted until 1:30pm EST on June 6th, 2015.

Entries can be made in the comments of the NING Website, or on CrokinoleCentre.

Good luck and have fun!