I know it's still 4 months before the election, but I think it's better to do it now while there's more uncertainty. So here's what I was thinking:
Every participant fills out a blank election map where you select either Obama or Romney winning each state. You can find interactive maps at 270towin.com (see attachment). Upon completion you take a screenshot of the map or send it to me in an e-mail.
For every state you get right, you get 1 point per electoral that the state is worth. For instance if you pick Obama winning California and Obama wins California you would receive 55 points. A perfect score would be 538. In the event of a tie between participants we can either split the prize or use some sort of tie breaker (such as picking the popular vote percentages of Obamney).
I am open to suggestions of different ways of doing this. In the interest of fairness I would PM Druff my map prior to receiving anybody else's maps. I would then post all the maps at once after everybody submits their map.
Buy-in/payouts:
I was thinking we could have several tiers for the buy-in. There's no reason that everybody should have to pay the same amount. You could chose between a $5 buy-in, a $25 buy-in or a $100 buy-in. If we have 10 people buy-in to the $5 one and 5 in the $25 one. Whoever wins the $5 one would get $50 and whoever wins the $25 tier would get $100. Although if there's more than 6 people in a tier, I would pay out multiple spots. Probably something like this (open to suggestions on altering this):
2-6 people:
1st - 100%
7-12entrants:
1st - 70%
2nd - 30%
13-18 entrants:
1st - 60%
2nd - 25%
3rd - 15%
19-25 entrants:
1st - 55%
2nd - 20%
3rd - 15%
4th - 10%
etc
I'm just posting this to see if there's any interest in participating in something like this. I would run it and do all the legwork. Druff will assure you that you can escrow me money with zero worries, and he means zero worries. So please post if you're interested and what buy-in level you would participate in. Gracias