The NFL season wrapped up in grand fashion with a riveting final game that literally came down to the wire and beyond as the Patriots overcame a 25 point deficit to win in the first overtime in Super Bowl history. Behind the headlines a lesser known battle was being fought in the Huddle app as the highly regarded Bishop_Eli overcame a 60,000 point deficit to win Huddle’s Playoff Challenge. It’s a weeks long cumulative series of contests where players pit their best scoring cards against each other in real time that requires a major commitment of time and resources to even come close. Bishop_Eli’s final score took the win by less than 400 points.
Now that things have settled down He was kind enough to take some time and reflect on it all. First off Congratulations! That was a tight finish for the Playoff challenge. What was your Super Bowl Sunday like in terms of the emotion as the game progressed? Super Bowl Sunday was a mixed bag as far as my emotions went. On the one hand I was fired up for the contest, but more for it to be over than the prospect of winning. I have a wife and kid and play fantasy etc. and usually like to spend Sundays with friends and family enjoying the games. These contests don't allow for that to play at the highest level, so in some respects I was just happy knowing it was almost over! Going into the game I was 60k behind "Dupes4Dupes", and I had been tracking his boost collection so knew it would be a tall task to overcome that hole. I did have a substantial advantage at a few spots though and early on those guys made some big plays like Deion Jones for Atlanta, as I opened up a bit of a lead in the premium contest I realized it was possible to catch him in overall as well. At that point my palms started sweating, the looks from my wife got more sidewise and I basically stopped watching the game all together. In order to play all the plays I need to keep open Gamecast to see who made each official tackle, and reloading those means no eyes on the TV. As the game finished up I was frustrated because I didn't pay as much attention to the free contest and that almost cost me in the overall, I wrapped up the premium fairly early and was fired up about that and was able to watch the finish of the game, which was nice as it ended up being in my opinion the best Super Bowl of all time. All that being said, when the game finished the overall leaderboard still showed me behind by about 10k points... it wasn't until 5-6 min after the game that they updated the last White TD and I realized I won! My wife game me a hug, I didn't fall asleep for hours and it was all worth it. Were you rooting for either team or did you not have a “dog in the fight”? I didn't have a dog in the fight, I'm a Dolphins fan though so by default I root against the Pats, it's not life and death for me though so I was happy to see a good game more than anything. I saw a fair amount of trash talking in the Feeds for the Championship Weekend games. Some of it was kind of harsh or maybe I’m just a big wuss. Is that all in fun in Huddle? For those that weren't on the premium contest boards for the AFC championship game, a little background on what happened. I was leading the entire contest and then at the end of the game Ben Roethlisburger threw a TD pass to a player without base cards (WR's score more than QBs so if you have a full page of WR and QBs its almost always better to play the WR) and user T44JRA who had a boatload of top Ben boosts passed me to win the contest, top prize was 2 1/1 Tom Brady sigs. In my admitted stupidity I took to the boards to complain about it, knowing full well that a couple things would happen. 1. No one cares, or wants to hear people at the top complain. And, 2. I was the only person that knew "Dupes4Dupes" gave T44JRA the majority of those boosts for the sole purpose of beating me, so my complaints would fall on deaf ears. As for the how and why behind this, again a bit of a story there. The how I knew was simple, I'm a bit of a nerd when I set my mind to these things and at the start of the playoffs I had decided to make a serious run at first place. I figured it would be best to track where I was as far as boosts go so I made a spread sheet of every player that had a "playoff base" boost released during the postseason. You can play 11 of the same player at once so my spreadsheet listed all the boosts 10x and up, the number I had at each and my goal was to get 11 of each of those players. I made this during conference championship week because that's when the started releasing 1/1 awards, and I knew T44 and Dupes would be my main competition so I recorded not just my own but their boosts as well. So it was a simple matter of looking at their inventory during the game and seeing all of the top boosts of Dupes gone in the 4th quarter and shifted over to T44. This is not unique to huddle, I know people do this on Bunt and UFC as well and I'm sure on skate... people collude to have one guy win, especially if they're out of the contest themselves. In this case T44 and myself were about 100k points ahead of Dupes and he had know chance of catching us so he gave his boosts to T44 to help him win. In and of itself I wouldn't have a problem with this, one friend helping another. The reason I took to the boards, and to be clear I shouldn't have, is that all of us have a bit of a history. Those guys are a part of a private trade/chat group for all of these games. One of the leaders of that group has a problem with me, simple as that. He has sent me a number of trades in game, all one sided, usually I just decline, but recently I declined with a comment along the lines of "how do you have a 5 star rating when you always send trades like this." He apparently is a lurker on the SWCT boards and saw me posting for help with contests and took issue with that. In the trade chat he said he doesn't like me begging and was going to make it his mission to see I lose in the contests. I have a friend in their chat group who informed me of this, and sent me screen shots of this guy posting to the group (60 or so people) to give all their huddle to T44 and Dupes and to take me out because I'm an ass. "Fuck that guy, anyone can win but him" I believe were the words. I had never personally had an issue with T44 or Dupes so I reached out to them before the championship games and let them know, no hard feelings but I was aware of what this guy was saying about me. This is why I was a little more stung that usual about the collusion, when in actuality it was probably just one guy out of contention helping his friend, on the plus side it motivated the hell out of me to grind for higher boosts for the Super Bowl and was indirectly responsible for my win, so it's not all bad! Moral of the story, don't complain on anonymous chat boards or games, people will tear you up with no context and little remorse. Also, a PSA, Topps doesn't care, I brought the collusion to their attention, provided screen shots of the inventory movement and they said "We can't comment on what is done to others accounts", so if this happens to you, you're SOL. Ouch. Kind of makes the win doubly sweet I guess! How big was Crosstrading for you in terms of resources for the game throughout the season, I understand you made some fairly painful sacrifices in SWCT particularly. Crosstrading was the only reason I was able to complete, simple as that. And, not just Topps apps, I made trades on Quidd, Gridiron, Dunk, Puppy and Kitten Cards as well. The two things that helped on those was finding people that would basically pull just for me, I've made some friends on each game and was pulling whatever they needed, I started this months ago so I was able to have a number of people save millions of coins over the months. In the end Star Wars accounted for my most notable cross trades as I already had a big collection there. I could name at least 20 people that I traded full sets to for huge amounts of coins... things like Nightbrothers set, Reflections, S1 vintages/wv, full sets of GM, shred, elegant weapons, premiere etc. Had it not been for cross trading and the relationships I made through the game and places like Reddit it would not have been possible. What was your focus this year in Huddle, were you also collecting sets for awards or mainly focusing on boosts for contests? My main focus this year was boosts, but I think Huddle did a great job with their sets especially marathons, and you've seen the other apps follow a similar 5 week/award format. That allowed me to collect a few sets I thought looked good... silver sigs, silver limited, splash and a few waves of archives and rising stars. On top of that there were some really nice sets like Inception that I couldn't pass up, a lot of those same people that helped me with the final playoff push in contests also helped with pulling sets like Inception, I finished the full gold base set which was a 40 card 55cc set. As you've seen people don't go for sets like they do in Star Wars so it's nice finishing sets like that knowing you'll end up with a very low cc award. For instance I finished purple bowman sigs and ended up getting 3 2cc award cards including a Dak Prescott, overall that wasn't too difficult of a set to complete and I got a card I could get $50 for, if I sold cards of course :). Also during the season there is no incentive for finishing higher than top 25 in any contest and that's not too hard to do with minimal work, so I could focus on sets during the season. So after taking the biggest win in the game this year are you going to go for it again next year? Dynasty? Finally, 1% chance I do it next year! The only way I would is if they have a similar postseason setup but with fantasy style contests. The unlimited play just take too much time away from family and I have no desire to do that again. Thanks again for taking a few minutes and May the Force be with You!
2 Comments
Dupes4Dupes2
4/4/2017 10:16:08 am
Seems a bit one-sided. If you want to publish both sides of the story send me an email. I'll be happy to agree with Bishop_Eli on some things and disagree with him on some things he left out.
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Gregg Keefer
4/4/2017 10:35:28 am
This was an interview. The veracity of the account is solely up to the person answering the questions and frankly one's perceptions color our reality. Your truth and reality may be different from another person experiencing theexact same event, three feet away.
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Gregg Keefer
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