Instead of burying the eventual outcome at the bottom, I’m going to go ahead and put it at the top. Given how well I did going into this week, it was a huge disappointment and a disaster to wind up with three third-place finishes and two fourth-place finishes.

But I’m still going to fill in some of the details for the morbidly curious. The games for tonight: Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy (turned off due to a malfunction before we could play it), Ghostbusters (the game that eventually replaced it in our assigned games), Iron Maiden, Houdini (which we did not play). My grouping: Rob Torres, Bryce Revnew, and John Carroll. I was fourth in the group, and that was the order (Rob always played after me, John before, and Bryce between them). And yeah, you can already see where this is going, given that Bryce has always been one of the better players in the league.

My scores, in order of play: 128.4M+ on Star Wars (fourth), 949.8M+ on Attack from Mars (third), 5.26M+ on Medieval Madness (third), 29.7M+ on Ghostbusters (fourth), and 14.6M+ on Iron Maiden (third). Rob and Bryce had all the first place finishes between them, with John taking second place in three out of five games.

Taking a look at how everyone else did, I’m seeing there aren’t many groups in which I could have been placed where I could have been expected to fare much better than I did. My Star Wars score might have been good for second in one other group but likely would have been last no matter what.

Winding up with a whopping eight standings points was really the last thing I expected. That was nowhere near enough to get it done, and well, my time at the top of the league standings was fun while it lasted. The good news is, I have still effectively clinched a spot in the A division playoffs, if for no other reason there are probably not enough first places to go around for enough other players to possibly all get 25 in both of the remaining two weeks, and I am still almost certainly going to get a seed in the top 5 in A division.

There is still a very slim chance I can get the #1 seed, but it would depend on things like both Phil Grimaldi choking pretty badly in both weeks 7 and 8 (or perhaps not showing up one of those two weeks) and my scoring 46 points combined between weeks 7 and 8. As an example of how unlikely that is, Phil’s lowest drop week ever in league history under the 5-3-2-1 scoring format was a 17 (Season 6, Week 7); until this season, the very concept that I’d do well enough for a 17 (or higher) to potentially be a drop week was laughable (but it almost happened this season).

I have a week to regroup before week 7, and I intend to make the best use of it that I possibly can.