JOTYA Prizes Awarded

by Crazy Ivan

On Wednesday we had our 4th annual JOTYA sack draft, but this year we did it in a whole new way.  First, let me fill in the details for those who are a bit newer to the Myachi movement.  If you're a veteran maniac and Myachi Forum member, you can feel free to skip the next three paragraphs.  I won't be offended.

JOTYA: An Acronym for the Jammer Of The Year Awards.  This is an award ceremony that we started in 2008 on the Myachi forum meant to recognize and reward those who go above and beyond the call of duty.  For those who show exemplary dedication to spreading the word of Myachi and expanding the community, we award rare Myachis.

Three winners are nominated and voted on by their peers on the Myachi Forum.  The STWAKOJ Award to the person who stands out the most in terms of teaching the game and spreading the word of Myachi to the masses.  The Trickster Award goes to the person who adds the most to the game in terms of creating new tricks and combos.  The Forum Award goes to the person who does the best job making the Myachi Forum a welcome and fun place to be.

The Sack Draft: At the end of the voting, the JOTYA winners are announced and a bunch of Myachis are selected to serve as trophies; rewards for a job well done.  I'll put together several rare Myachis and then we'll hold a "Sack Draft" where each winner gets to select their prize.  Draft order is determined by margin of victory so which ever winner received the highest percentage of votes in their category gets first choice and the person who won the narrowest victory selects last.

Now, let's welcome back all the people who are rejoining us from the 1st paragraph.  How you guys been?  Anyway, on to the new twist to the Sack Draft that I was so stoked about at the beginning of this entry.

Thanks to the Wednesday Night Brawl, we were able to do the sack draft live this year.  In the past I would put the list of sacks on the forum and the winners would stop in and post their selections.  It was fun and all the runners-up had a good time tossing out advice on which sack to take, but it took forever sometimes if one winner didn't get on the forum for a week or something.

Since our winners this year were all regulars on the Wednesday Night Brawl, we saved a bunch of time and added some real excitement to the whole ordeal by doing it on TinyChat.  It was actually pretty funny.  DGH was on at 6 O'clock on the dot and so was Downtown, but Mantis (the 3rd winner) didn't get on for about an hour.

The whole time there's a palpable anticipation coming from DGH, too.  Every time somebody would sign on to the chat he would say "I bet that's Mantis!" and then it would be Buffalo or MMFL or Monki or any of a number of other people who aren't Mantis.  Finally somebody signs on and he goes "That's Mantis, I bet!" and, of course, it was.  He doesn't skip a beat, either.  As soon as "guest-4102" changes his name to Mantis, DGH goes "I called it."

So finally we got all 3 winners on together and I presented the potential prizes.  I only had 6 sacks but I was giving everyone 2 prizes so DGH picked 1st and 4th (owned his category), Mantis picked 2nd and 5th (won his category by a few votes) and Downtown picked 3rd and got what was left at 6 (squeaked by two people by a single vote!).

I'd love to put some pics up along with the list, but Pinky's got the camera at the office and I'm at the House of Skills, so I'll have to settle for naming them:

• Martha
• Member's Solutions
• Reuben's Rockin' Bar Mitzvah
• St. Bernard's
• Sam Gallen's
• Wolfman

I should point out that the list above is alphabetical, not in the order they were selected or in order of rarity or anything.  As most any Myachi collector can tell you, though, the top 2 sacks alphabetically are also the top 2 in terms of value.  Not surprisingly, DGH picked the Martha first and Mantis scooped up the Member's Solutions 2nd.  Worked out well for Downtown who had confessed that he wanted the Wolfman most long before we actually started picking.

So for those keeping score at home, the winners of this year's JOTYA took:

• DGH = Martha (Yellow) and St. Bernard's
• Mantis = Member's Solutions and Reuben's
• Downtown = Wolfman and a Red Shredder

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that one of those was not among the prizes listed above.  After all the pics were made I told the winners that if they'd like to swap out either sack for a new 5.0 they could.  Since the Sam Gallen is a kind of tough jammer and since it was made for a birthday party Downtown wasn't at for a kid he doesn't know, he opted to take the Red Shredder instead.

It was a lot of fun doing the draft live and in the future whenever that's possible I think we'll do it that way.  This'll be the last we hear about JOTYA for a little while, so I also wanted to take a second to thank everyone that participated by nominating or voting.  I was surprised by how big a response we got since the forum's been a bit slow of late.  It's been a great year and I have a lot of reason to believe that 2011 is going to be our biggest year yet.

Pinky to mail out yet.  I'm really sorry.  They'll go out Monday for sure, though.  I'm in the office Saturday and Sunday so they'll be all enveloped and waiting for her when she gets to the office on Monday.