Judging the You-Tube Contest

by Crazy Ivan

As you well know, we've done a bunch of contests since we started the Myachi Blog.  We've done photo contests, art contests, video contests, guessing contests, trivia contests, writing contests, creativity contests and, of course, skill contests.

My hope is that everyone is having fun with these things and the feedback I'm getting is almost exclusively positive.  The only negative reactions I've heard so far are things like "we should do less art contests" or "we should do more art contests".  I've had a lot of suggestions for future contests and a few disputes about the results of certain contests, but by and large all I've heard is praise for Myachi Man's charitable nature for freeing up so many great Myachis for give-aways.

The only problem is that most of the time these suckers are no fun to judge.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  Seeing all the cool ideas, drawings, stories and videos that the Myachi-verse puts together is actually a lot of fun.  The only thing that isn't fun is that somebody always has to lose.  In fact, generally speaking a lot of people have to lose.  Well... more have to lose than win, anyway.

I hate being in the position of deciding who to leave out so I usually pawn that responsibility on to someone else.  I have the other masters or even some random friends choose the winners so that I can't be accused of favoritism or anything.

But this most recent contest, the You-Tube Trick-of-the-Day contest, has been ridiculously fun to judge.

The idea, as you're probably aware, is that each contestant has to do as many tricks as they can in a row without a drop.  The catch is that all the tricks have to be "Trick of the Day" moves that I've put up on video in the last few months.

So in order to judge this thing, I've got to watch all these videos everyday.  It's actually pretty tough.  I have to keep count of the tricks (and if you think that's easy, watch one of these videos and keep a count) but I also have to watch each move closely to make sure that it was hit cleanly and properly.

So far most of the videos have at least one or two errors in them so 1 or 2 (or more) of the tricks on the video don't count toward the total.  After each video is submitted, I watch it 2 or 3 times to make sure I'm catching all pinches, traps, errors, etc. and to make sure that I've counted the number of tricks correctly.

What's funny is that from time to time I'm finding myself in breathless suspense as I watch people do their tricks.  I just got done watching a video from Myachi Max (it's on Facebook rather than You-Tube so don't bother hunting for it) where he set the new record at 60 and by the time he got toward the end I found myself riveted to the screen, palms sweating and breath hitched, hoping he wouldn't drop.

See, because this contest is so absolute (as opposed to an art contest where you have to subjectively measure which picture is "best"), it really doesn't matter if I root for anyone.  I can't effect the outcome so it's okay for me to get excited right along with the entrants.  It occurs to me that this is by far the most fun I've had with one of these contests so far.  My only hope is that the people who are competing are having as much fun as me.

If that's the case, I can say definitively that this has been a really successful contest.

Oh, so for those keeping score at home, Myachi Max is currently in the lead with 60 tricks.  Mantis demolished his previous record late last night, but Mantis' new record of 58 didn't even last a day.