Dealbreaker Tourney Challenge 2017: Prove Your Worth

First place get a ride on Uber-but-for-helicopters (for real). Last place gets Dealbreaker swag.

Author:: Jon Shazar
Updated:: Jan 14, 2019
Original:: Mar 14, 2017

Buffers on tour [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

You spend all year measuring yourself against your colleagues and competitors: B-school rankings, bonuses, league tables, the now all-too-rare eating contest. But let’s face it: The fact that you snuck past an admissions officer and the knowledge that your desk is succeeding in spite of you tend to diminish your sense of individual achievement. And even if you’ve mastered the narcissistic art of deluding yourself into thinking that the reflected glory is all yours, none of the above offer the satisfaction of knowing that you, personally, on your own, are the best without causing gastrointestinal distress.

That’s where this most sacred and important of times and contests come in: The annual Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament challenge. We all know you’re going to spend the next two days poring over matchups and defensive metrics, anyway, snow day or no snow day. Why enjoy your inevitable victory over only colleagues and your friends from college when you can lord it over the entire Street?

And we really mean over the entire Street: Winner gets a ride on a BLADE helicopter. Last place gets to hide their shame and generally worthlessness as a person behind a coveted Dealbreaker banker bag.

Enough with the preliminaries: Click here and fill out your bracket right now. Or whenever your model spits out the guaranteed 192-pointer. Get your brackets in before Princeton tips off with Notre Dame at noon on Thursday. Standard scoring system. Ties broken by total score in the championship game. Ties there broken by a duel to the death.

Dealbreaker Tournament Challenge

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For the FREE HELICOPTER RIDE we're giving away.

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Plus a visit from 1884 National League triple-crown winner and obscene gesture pioneer Old Hoss Radbourn.

SPOKANE, WA - NOVEMBER 18: Fans for the Gonzaga Bulldogs cheer for their team during the game against the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks at McCarthey Athletic Center on November 18, 2015 in Spokane, Washington. Gonzaga defeated Northern Arizona 91-52. (Photo by William Mancebo/Getty Images)

By which we mean helicopter ride (no joke).

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Winners, losers and intentional losers from March Madness' first week.

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The rest of you can officially stop paying attention now.

As Dealbreaker historians will recall, 2011 marked our first Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament Challenge. It was inspired by a financial services hack who made the public announcement that he planned to (anonymously) report any colleagues he caught filling out brackets and keeping tabs on their picks during business hours. At the time, we encouraged you all to enter as many pools as were available, making it impossible for him to keep up with the amount of people and their offenses he needed to rat out, and created one to do our part. Is this guy still on the loose? He very well might be but regardless: never forget. To that end, sign up for the Third Annual Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament Challenge today. If you need reason beyond being able to say you won the DBNCAATC, first place will receive dinner for him/herself plus some colleagues and/friends at Peter Luger* and the must-have item of the season, a blue and green Dealbreaker banker bag.

As Dealbreaker historians will recall, last March marked our first Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament Challenge. It was inspired by a financial services hack who made the public announcement that he planned to (anonymously) report any colleagues he caught filling out brackets and keeping tabs on their picks during business hours. At the time, we encouraged you all to enter as many pools as were available, making it impossible for him to keep up with the amount of people and their offenses he needed to rat out, and created one to do our part. Is this guy still on the loose? He very well might be but regardless: never forget. To that end, sign up for the Second Annual Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament Challenge today. If you need reason beyond being able to say you won the DBNCAATC, first place will receive dinner for him/herself plus some colleagues and/friends at Peter Luger's, an outing funded by us,* a Greenlight Capital messenger bag, a Pershing Square golf umbrella, a pair of Third Point-branded running sneakers, and an I Heart Dealbreaker button.** The pool will once again be managed by Dealbreaker Commenter and Friend NakedShort, who, along with myself, will answer any questions you might have, provide color if warranted (rip everyone’s brackets to shreds, call out the bottom 5 performers), etc. Sign up here now.*** So it is abundantly clear, if you do not want participants to know your real name, MAKE SURE TO FILL OUT SOMETHING ELSE IN THE NAME FIELDS. For example, if your ID is Godswork, rather than writing Lloyd B, enter first name: Gods, last name: work. To that end, if you don’t want people to see your email address, from the bracket page, click ‘options’ and then ‘hide email.’ If you feel it necessary, create an entirely new email account specifically for this challenge. Finally, don’t use HisHoliness as your ID because Alan Greenspan’s already called dibs. The pool password is: animalliar Dealbreaker NCAA Tournament Challenge [CBS Sports] *Last year we offered Wall Street North favorite Beamers Cafe, but the winner had "already seen all Beamers had to offer," and choose an alternative venue. This year, feel free to think outside the box. **If any other hedge funds, private equity firms, or banks would like to be represented via swag, feel free to get in touch! ***NakedShort says you have until Thursday morning to fill out a bracket but you should just get on this ASAP.

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You're going to suck at filling out your bracket again this year, so come suck with us!...Wait, hold on...