Going for a personal record here: 8 posts in a month. And it’s a short month (February) to boot…not too shabby. So, I’ve written before that one of my guilty pleasures is ESPN’s Streak for Cash. Actually, it’s more than just a guilty pleasure…it’s a full blown addiction or sickness or whatever you want to call it at this point. Some people say that insanity is when a person repeats the same task over and over, but still expects a different outcome from that action every time. Well, a quick little look at my Streak for Cash history shows that I’ve been playing since August of 2008. That’s like 3 and a half years of the little monkey pushing the lever expecting to get a food pellet when he gets hit in the head with a mallet instead. My record is far from stellar. A quick little Excel spreadsheet shows that I am 796-701-40 all-time in Streak for Cash. That’s me picking the correct outcome only 53.2% of the time. If that was me betting with a bookie, 53% would be making me a lot of money, but when the object of the game is to pick as many correct games right in a row as you can, 53% isn’t going to get it done.
Now, you play Streak for Cash for free, so it’s not like I’m betting away our mortgage or anything, but it still seems like an exercise in futility most of the time. Whoever decides what games to put up on the site to allow you to pick from (much like the oddsmakers in Vegas) know what they’re doing. These games are legitimately hard to pick, and even if they weren’t hard it doesn’t matter…only 1 person wins every month (each month everyone’s streak gets reset, and the contest starts over). What the difficulty level does do though is weed out even more pretenders. To build a streak, you have to be lucky and knowledgeable (which I like to think I am), but just like in regular gambling you have to have restraint too (which I don’t have much of at all). Know when to fold ‘em, and all that good stuff…thankfully, I never really got into gambling or sports betting because I think I would be terrible at that aspect of it. Even if I get a streak going, I inevitably will try to pick some Euro-league soccer match that I know nothing about, and ka-blam-o…there goes the streak.
My all-time best streak was 14. I was pretty proud of it at the time, but realistically I wasn’t even close to winning. The average winner from month to month has a streak in the mid to high 20’s. Take my picks this month for example: 17-14-1 with a monthly best of 7 in a row. Not bad, but the current leader is already up to a streak of 22. That’s not even a third as long as this month’s current leader, and the eventually winner will probably have a streak even greater than that. And yet every morning (often multiple times a day) I point my browser or mobile device app to Streak for Cash and make a pick, alternating right and wrong picks on average. Sometimes I wonder if this is all just some elaborate psychological experiment, and we are all the willing participants. Think of all the free data some dorky guy in a lab coat would have for a study! Maybe one day this monkey will finally get his food pellet…or maybe he will just keep getting whacked in the head with that mallet…my guess is the latter though. Either way, I don’t see himself not pushing the lever anytime soon.
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