Dead pooling – betting on which celeb will be the next to kick the bucket – is proving compulsive for serious gamblers in corporate America and the City of London. Stephen McDowell helps you gain liquidity from morbidity.
Never mind the office sweepstake or the Grand National – if you really want to have some fun and maybe make a few clams in the process, get stuck into an increasingly popular game where the globe is your race course, celebrities your runners and bad taste the only acceptable currency.
Dead pool gambling, otherwise known as a ghoul pool, allows you to bet, not on which horse will cross the line first but which celebrity will meet their demise next.
Just like one studies the form to find a winner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, research is vital to those who want to score highly in dead pooling. The only real difference is that instead of poring over tiny digits and pundits’ outpourings, your research materials for the dead pool are the world’s gossip columns, celebrity mags and gutter tabloids. Your sources will be ambulance drivers, nightclub doormen and celeb hangout barkeeps.
Abra-cadaver!
Getting into some bad taste fun couldn’t be simpler. Typically each player pays a sum of money into a pot and makes ten selections. For each one on the list who dies within a one year period from the start of the game, the player scores points – ten points for your number one choice, nine for number two, and so on.
The game controller or ‘Stiffmaster’ can create extra incentives for creative corpse-in-waiting selection. For example, he might introduce a bonus scheme where you score an extra ten points if your successful selection is over 80 when they die, or 75 bonus points if they are under 30.
One variant is to share a points pool according to how many players have the same selection. That way, if lots of players reckon they have a dead cert, they end up with only a few points if the nominated celeb buys the farm, but if only one canny punter has selected a candidate to cark it, he wins big.
The rules differ from pool to pool, but one of the best known, stiffs.com, is the simplest. You pay $15 to get in, scoring is on a ten for one and one for ten basis, as above, and the winner of the 2004 game will receive portions of the pool, which is set at $2,994. The winner gets $2,004, second place $500, third $200, down to small prizes for tenth place.
Stiffmaster Lee Atwater has a list of celebrities, but entrants may submit additional names for approval. If they fail though, the selection will be struck out and you are in with only nine.
More complex rules can be garnered from another top dead pool at deadpool.rotten.com (be careful with this site if you are accessing it from work and your internet police are former members of the Gestapo).
This has a simple one-for-one scoring system and a new game every 30 days. Ties are decided by an in-house committee called the Star Chamber, where ‘a Kurt Cobain scores more than a Bob Hope’.
Cessation regulation
The effective stiffmaster will do well to establish a set of game rules, typically something like these:
>> No market manipulation by murdering any members of your list.
>> No condemned prisoners. Even American ones who are likely to outlive your as yet unborn children.
>> Players are responsible for ensuring their picks are alive at the time of selection. (a good research tool for this is dead-or-alive.org).
>> Celebs must actually be dead, no out-of-body experiences, resuscitation or apparent death-like states (such as Keith Richard’s.)
>> Insider trading. This is enthusiastically encouraged. Nice nuggets of news like terminal illnesses, rehab, fatwas, etc should be shared between players. Holding out takes the fun out of gloating.
On-corpse betting
An extra advantage of dead pool betting is that it harmlessly allows you to revenge yourself on celebrities you can’t stand. A treble of Liz Hurley, Posh Spice and Leonardo Di Caprio, if you were me, might well not get you any points in the game, but it will definitely make you feel a lot better.
Johnny de Wynter (name changed to protect the heinous), former stiffmaster of the 70-strong Lloyds’ of London Ghoul Pool, which charged entrants £10, says: ‘You basically get two types of players. Obviously all of them adore bad taste but you get the clever so-and-sos who do their research, like reading up on the Middle East, and pick those most in line for a sudden demise. Then you get those who pick whole pools of people they simply don’t like – Ben Affleck and David Hasselhoff were very popular picks.’
Atwater concurs: ‘Many a well researched list has been undermined by its compiler’s obsessive hatred for a particular celebrity or two (or three).
‘We here at stiffs.com encourage the active loathing of famous people. It’s what dead pools are all about. Our suggestion, however, is not to dilute the strength of a powerful entry with the names of despicable, yet healthy people.’
In America, where dead pooling is challenging golf as a post-work pastime for the well-heeled, it is not unknown for considerable sums of money to change hands in the name of research. But, says Atwater, careful balance can yield rewards: ‘Concentrate all the venomous feelings you harbour for the world’s most detestable citizens (terrorists, talk show hosts and Simon Cowell, for instance) in a separate entry. The very act of committing those names to paper, with the entry fee naturally, will serve to purge your tortured heart of a full year’s worth of unwanted vitriol, while still maintaining your competitive edge.’
Tea or coffin?
The origins of dead pooling are as murky as you would expect. It is thought to have come from the States and predates the internet.
One Scottish company achieved notoriety in the mid-1980s when some of its more vile-minded staff were found to have bet on the demise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, and today it is highly popular in companies where trading, and therefore taking a punt, is a part of the profession.
De Wynter says: ‘We’ve experienced a bit of a dip in enthusiasm since the Queen Mum, the Ace in the pack, copped it and of course Bob Monkhouse, but I think this is largely because they were heavily backed. It remains very popular, particularly in the City.’
So, how do you really pick a successful ghoul pool? Just like a portfolio of shares, the key to successful dead pool betting is balanced risk. The winning pools tend to have a good spread with varying weights so you can balance risk with regularity and a good punt with predictability. Attain balance by selected from the following categories:
The Queen Mum
Named after its now-departed most famous example, the coffin-dodger category would be those aged over 90 and/or ravaged by incurable disease, or people who are famously sick but with illogical longevity – the Pope, say, or Professor Stephen Hawking or Ronnie Biggs. They should be a good source of predicable points but be wary not to end up with a George Burns – a nightmare for celeb pool pickers – who despite his heroic stogie consumption died happily aged 101.
The Entwhistle
These are your solid runners. A classic of the genre is the ageing rock or sports star with heart problems and a literally die-hard penchant for cocaine and hookers. It’s named after The Who bass player who was found, highly appropriately in the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas, passed away in such a manner last year, thus yielding massive points for any player with him in their pool. Speaking of pools, any rock star who is known to party hard and possess a swimming pool might be worth including in this category.
The James Dean
Great odds can be yielded from properly researching what goes on behind the scenes anywhere you find fit young men – footballers, actors and rock stars are best – with lots of money. Those who spend their loot on big toys with very powerful engines and adopt a playful attitude towards drugs and booze could help you win big when they fail to execute an emergency stop on a moonlit country road.
The Malcolm X
Be controversial and loud enough for long enough and you’re sure eventually to piss off someone who has a gun and a mental illness, or a state which lacks a firm appreciation of the sanctity of its critics’ lives. Odds shorten the nearer they are to the Middle East.
Click the ‘How To’ button for our dead pool picks in our very own ‘Perishable Portfolio’.
