"GERRY": Not too well. After having to pick near the end, it can take some luck to get an early pick. Or, you get a good driver and he finishes poorly and back you go. This last race I picked 22nd. I took Joey Logano figuring the rookie might get into the top ten and help me the following week. He finshed 13th, so I'll have a half way decent pick next week. A few of the drivers ahead of him were not picked such as Reutimann (4th) and Bowyer (2nd), so this will get me a higher pick too. When it was my pick, I almost took Kenseth. He started 40th, but he's a good driver and proven as compared to Logano, but I went with Logano just on the hunch and he had a faster car in qualifying. I did not watch the race, but I have a print out of the race results and it looks like Kenseth only completed 6 laps and finished dead last!

I only picked one winner last year. We usually have 15 to 25 people in the pool. If you can pick two winners for the season, you'll break even for the whole year moneywise. Twice I've picked four winners for the whole season. Winning takes the whole pool, but you pick last the following week. Everyone else picks in the order that they finish in. When there's fifteen or so people, everyone usually can pick a good driver. 20 or more people and it starts to get tough for the people picking late. If you're one of those people likes a certain driver, it can get frustrating if someone grabs him before you do, but it makes the pool kind of fun that way especially when you do better at the finish than someone that picked before you. Picking last and winning has happened, but it's been awhile since someone won two races in a row. When I was the commissioner, I had a side pot and kept track of everyone's points that their driver earned each race. At the end of the year, we gave out money to the top three people in points. That was a lot of work and it's not easy for people that don't know numbers and charts like I do, so the commissioners since I resigned have just gone with a winner take all each race.

One year I had a separate pool in addition to the regular pool. Because of the inherent unfairness of picking in the regular pool, I decided to make a parimutuel type pool. Let people pick whenever they wanted and as many drivers as they wanted and bet whatever amount they wanted. So some drivers could have more than one person picking them, but then if he won the people would split the winnings based on their share of the pool. Just like horse racing is done here in California, though I took no cut out of the pool like the tracks do. This was quite fair, but for some reason it didn't catch on and people liked the pool that we already had going, flawed and all. :)