Louisville may have won the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament last night, but the only match-up that Middle-earth fans were watching was that between Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf the Grey. After an initial significant lead, Thorin’s army of fans brought him back from the depths. These two popular Hobbit characters scraped and scrounged for every single vote resulting in an amazingly close final.
As promised, we carefully reviewed the voting process and as it turns out, we are pleased to report there was not a lot of significant over-voting. Any small adjustments made did not affect the final result. So without further delay, we are pleased to announce that the 2013 Middle-earth March Madness Champion is….
See the UPDATE below for final tallies and some additional notes on voting.
Gandalf the Grey!
Here are the links to all of the final match-ups and results, including a downloadable tourney bracket.
[Download Final Bracket] [Final Four Results] [Elite Eight Results] [Round 3 Results] [Round 2 Results][Round 1 Results]
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UPDATE: A few notes on the finals…
1. The final results were 3,820 for Gandalf and 3,600 for Thorin
2. There were a total of 74 votes that were considered suspicious and reduced to a single vote for each IP/user. As it turned out they resulted into 14 votes total. The suspicious votes were for both Thorin AND Gandalf. Not all Thorin or all Gandalf.
3. The silent vote was instituted when it was obvious there were a few folks ‘working’ the system and figuring out the percentages to manipulate the voting.
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Some of you may be wondering if we are still considering a Middle-earth March Madness 2013 T-shirt. If you are interested, please join our email list for the shirt. We will email all subscribers with how to purchase a shirt shortly.
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