muskalungee  09/24/2007 - 09:50  Shows and Events    Well, as you may have noticed I didn't win the Tundra or the Nitro from my 45" Tiger Musky that qualified me for the Maryland Fishing Challenge. Actually, I didn't win a stinkin' thing! They raffled off over 50 prizes before the grand prize drawing and out of the 112 people there...my number wasn't called. I was impressed as to how smoothly things were being run, and was actually about to mention that to the guys that were standing around me....and then they proceeded to the grand prize drawing where it got REAL interesting.

As you can see from this photo, they had a board on stage which had a card which represented each of the five finalists. Each card had 3 blank white squares to represent each of the 3 digits of the 128 registered anglers (out of 224) who showed up to claim their shot at the grand prizes. Someone at DNR thought it would be a great idea to use the Maryland Lotto Machine and pull ping pong balls from the machine to select each of the finalist, one digit at a time. Their fantastic plan was to select all the first digits, then the second, followed by the third until they had their five finalists on stage. However, the issue was that there was only 128 people there and only putting a single "1" and "0" in the hopper slanted the outcome in favor of the people from 100-127 (of which I was # 112).

Being a math geek, I recognized this right away..but it took getting through the first round where 4 of the 5 finalists started with a "1" for the crowd to start to mumble. When the 2nd round started they put balls representing 0-9 in the hopper. Which was fine, until they selected a "4" for one of the finalists that started with a "1". (confused yet?). The problem is that only 100-127 were valid #'s, and now the crowd really started realizing what a debacle this was. People started screaming, yes literally screaming obscenities regarding bovine feces. As if that wasn't bad enough, people starting rushing the stage yelling at Gov. O'Malley. It was quite reminiscent of what happens in the NFL when the ref makes a bad call and the players gather around to make their case.

So, after a quick huddle on stage they scrapped the Lottery approach and sent us all back to the registration table to pick up raffle tickets. From that point on it was pretty smooth. :) But I still didn't win. :)

For the rest of the story, you can see this great writeup by Candus Thomson at the Baltimore Sun:
'Diamond Jim' gimmick sinks fast

To see some of the pics I snapped while I was there: http://picasaweb.google.com/muskalungee/2007MarylandFishingChallenge Also, Governor O'Malley gave a little speech which I have uploaded to youtube and will be posting later today.

Muskalungee!
-Mike