Fans won and saved more than $1,250 off any sport, concert or theater tickets in our marketplace in the 2018 Monday Night Ticket Score (MNTS), led by a third year fan who won $225 and the pool championship.
First things first. The week 16 winner is first year fan Bakedpotato, who was among the 35% of fans to pick the Oakland Raiders' 27-14 upset of the Denver Broncos. But his 28-17 prediction was the only one within three points of each team's score, which earns him the $5 weekly winner Mega credit, and, notably, 84.2 pool points (more on that in a minute).
Related: Week 16 Season Week-By-Week All-Time How Credits Work
Q4 and Season Standings
The Q4 winner is Dirty024, a four-time weekly winner and now a two-time quarterly winner, joining a short list of fans who've won multiple quarters (the others are ckmendels, Dread Pirate Dave, chrishill_8, diegobub, julesschneider and nina). He scores a $15.65 Mega credit despite a quarterly performance that ranks in the lower half of quarterly winners since the pool's current scoring structure began in 2014. His point total of 130.8 ranks 12th of 20, and his average prediction differential of 8.25 is 15th best.
The 2018 pool champion is 3rd year fan jredd1970, who wins the Grand Prize of a $207.30 Mega credit. She's the third consecutive pool champion to win the season without having won a week, and the fourth consecutive to do so without winning a quarter. So how'd she do it?
Among fans who played at least eight weeks, Jredd1970 had the 24th best score match rate (6%), the 8th best rate of predictions within seven points (59%), the 11th best rate at picking the winner (75%) and the 17th best rate at correct underdog predictions (13%). Only two other fans, fgreenslate (11th) and hxcpunk (46th), exceeded those thresholds. (Hxcpunk only played 14 weeks.) Jredd1970 was also one of only 11 fans who posted at least four top 10 weekly finishes.
Quarterly winners and the season champion are also guaranteed one of the 10 First Prize berths.
First Prize Berths: The 10 Fans Who Will Play For $10,000
On February 3, 2019, ten fans will have the opportunity to predict the halftime and final scores of the Super Bowl to win up to $10,000. The three other quarterly winners who will join jredd1970 and Dirty024 are nina (Q1 winner), Heard (Q2 winner), and redskinsrule (Q3 winner). The remaining spots go to the five weekly winners with the highest one-week point totals who did not win a quarter or the season: kellyp420 (W9 winner, 124 points), chilln4425 (W10 winner, 121.3 points), PinstripesNY (W3 winner, 91 points), jkulaga23 (W2 winner, 84.7 points) and this week's winner, bakedpotato. If you are one of those fans, congratulations! We will be in touch with you offline once the two Super Bowl teams are set.
How it Compares to Other Games
Since 2006, 27 is the 4th most frequent NFL score and 14 is 9th. With median and average score prediction differentials of 8 and 8.5, this was squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of pool prediction difficulty, being the 93rd most difficult out of 196 games in the 12 year history of the pool. According to Scorigami, this is the 81st game in NFL history that ended by the score of 27-14.
For these and similar statistics and analysis, follow @themegapool on Twitter.
This also wraps up the 2018 Mega Pool, which we'll cover in a separate, future update.
We hope you enjoyed the pool! We're always interested in your feedback, which you may share on Facebook, Twitter, or by direct email.
Happy Holidays!