OVERVIEW

After a three-year hiatus, The Apprentice Certainty Contest is back and the stars have come out to raise money for charity! You pick the celebrities who you think will last the longest. The longer they last, the more points you score. At the end of the season, the player with the highest score wins.

ELIGIBILITY

1. This contest is open to all subscribers of the alt.tv.the-apprentice newsgroup (ATTA, for short), regardless whether they are regulars, semi-regulars, or lurkers. There is no limit on the size of the field. The more, the merrier. Non-ATTA members who visit my website, the Game Show Warehouse, or members of any other newsgroup, message board, or discussion forum of which the commissioner is a member, may also enter if they so choose.
2. On Monday, April 5, 2010, the day after the fourth episode has aired and four celebrities (maybe more) have been fired, I will post a call for entries on ATTA and any other message boards where the contest may be of interest. Players wishing to participate may either reply to the newsgroup or e-mail me at tjwuthrich[at]verizon[dot]net. (Remember to replace the words in brackets with the punctuation they describe.)

HOW TO PLAY

1. Each player wishing to participate will be given 100 Certainty Points, or CPs, to distribute among the fourteen famous "job applicants" however he/she wishes, based on how certain he/she is that each will be selected by Donald Trump as "The Celebrity Apprentice" at the end of the season.

2. The following restricitions apply on dividing your CPs:

• You must assign a minimum of one CP to at least three different applicants.
• There is a limit of 50 CPs per applicant.
• Each applicant you name must be given whole, positive CPs. No partial, negative, irrational, or imaginary numbers (i.e. -10, pi, or 2 + 3i), please.
• Your CPs must total 100, no more, no less. You've got them, so why leave them on the table?

Other than that, you have complete flexibilty. You can give CPs to all of the remaining candidates, or to just five of them, or anything in between, as long as you comply with the restrictions above.

3. If an entry is determined to be invalid, the player will be notified of what he/she did wrong and will be asked to try again.

4. If I receive multiple entries from a single participant, I will accept his/her latest valid entry. In other words, I will assume that subsequent entries are updates to old entries. Unlike past Certainty Contests, the entry period is more than one week, so if one of your choices gets fired before the entry period closes, you've got time to make changes.

Let's use last year's stars as an example. If you are 30% certain that Annie Duke would be win, 25% certain that Joan Rivers will win, 20% certain of Joan's daughter Melissa, 10% sure of each of Brande Roderick and Clint Black, 3% sure of Claudia Jordan, and 2% sure of Andrew Dice Clay, your entry would look like this:

  Annie Duke       - 30
  Joan Rivers      - 25
  Melissa Rivers   - 20
  Brande Roderick  - 10
  Clint Black      - 10
  Claudia Jordan   -  3
  Andrew Dice Clay -  2

If two candidates have the same first name, make sure you distinguish between them. Usually, such candidates go by their first names and last initials. The names do not have to be in any order, but I would advise arranging the names alphabetically to make the record-keeping a little easier. Just don't try to give points to someone like Piers Morgan (wrong season), Buzz Aldrin (wrong show), or Donald Trump himself. Theoretically, you are allowed to give CPs to the first four people that Trump fired, but I wouldn't recommend it. J

5. Entries must be timestamped before Sunday, April 11, 2010, 6:00 pm Eastern Time (5pm CT/3pm PT)--three hours before the fifth episode airs in the Eastern and Central time zones. Be sure to include the name you wish to go by in the standings. If you do not sign a name, I will take the name in the "From" header of the entry.

SCORING

1. Each candidate is assigned a placement based on how long he/she lasts in the job interview. However, because of potential confusion caused by occasions where Trump fires two or more people at once, placements will now based on the number of tasks candidates last instead of the number of candidates fired before them. For example, all candidates Trump fires after the first task are given a placement of 1, those fired after the second task 2, the third task 3, and so on. The runner-up is given a placement matching the number of tasks delivered throughout the entire season, which was 12 last year, and the celebrity that gets "hired" gets one higher. Since we're starting the contest with the fifth task, you get all of the previous firings as free passes! This means that all candidates fired in the first episode after the deadline will have a placement of 5. In the event a candidate quits voluntarily or is released for any other reason, such as injury or disqualification, it counts a firing. This placement is multiplied by the number of CPs you have placed on that candidate, and your total score is determined by adding up the multiplied points. The player with the highest score at the end of the season is the winner.

Going back to the Celebrity Season 2 example above, The Donald issued a total of 13 tasks. Joan was named The Celebrity Apprentice, Annie was the runner-up, Brande was fired after the twelfth task, Clint went out the task before her, Melissa the task before him, Claudia lasted four tasks, and Andrew was fired after the first task. Under the scoring system above, here's how your final score would have been calculated:

2. To date, no fired candidate has ever been reinstated into the job interview after being fired (similar to the Outcast twist in Survivor: Pearl Islands), other than as "employees" of candidates still in the running (such as the final task). Last year, Joan and Melissa stormed off the show after a heated Boadroom argument, but both returned for the next task. If a firing is ever reversed, the candidate's placement will be based on when that candidate is fired for good, and some earlier placements may change. By defintion, a candidate's placement is the number of tasks Trump has delivered and resolved up to the Boardroom where he/she is no longer in the running for the title of Celebrity Apprentice as of the end of the season.

3. In case of any event not outlined above takes place, the commissioner (which am I) reserves the right to make an executive decision.

STRATEGY

The Certainty Contest is a game of strategy. To win, you want to place the most points on the applicants you think will last the longest. The best possible entry is to have 50 CPs on the winner, 49 on the runner-up, and 1 on a celebrity that falls one task short of the final task. Assuming that this year's season has 13 tasks as last year did, a perfect score would be as much as (50 x 14) + (49 x 13) + (1 x 12) = 700 + 637 + 12 = 1,349 points. However, if by some chance all three of your choices perform so poorly in the first task that Trump fires all of them immediately, you'd have the lowest possible score of 100 points. But since you'll be spotted the first four episodes' worth of firings, your final score will fall somewhere between 500 and 1,349, with the average score being 925.

The safest strategy is to assign CPs evenly to all ten remaining celebrities, which comes to 10 CPs per star. However, this method offers no deviation at all, so the better strategy is to take risks. But be careful. If you had 50 CPs on the Week 5 Project Manager and he/she blows it, you're in big trouble.

MISCELLANEOUS

1. Once your final entry is submitted, all you have to do from then on is root for your favorite candidates. After the East Coast airing of The Celebrity Apprentice--usually within 24 hours--I will post the weekly leaderboard to ATTA (and all other participating forums) and the Standings page, showing the current scores and remaining CPs for all participants. If you live in the Mountain or Pacific time zone, however, please be advised that the standings may be posted before the show airs on your NBC station (if I do it Sunday, it's one less thing I have to do on Monday). You might also be an irrepressible fan of Desperate Housewives or Family Guy and wait to watch it on DVR or online. Either way, this post may be considered a spoiler.

2. Like the Survivor contest, I will calculate the average number CPs for all candidates and use this to create a false entry. You can use this entry to gauge how you are doing against the field as a whole.

3. Because I, commissioner of the ATTA Certainty Contest, have no advance knowledge of the outcome, I have the option to participate as well.

4. You are permitted to discuss the reasoning behind your entry on ATTA or your respective forum, but if you use any spoilers to construct your entry, please follow general courtesy guidelines. These include the use of proper spoiler space and/or ROT-13 encoding as well as the addition to the word "spoiler" to the subject.

5. On the weekly leaderboard, players will be ranked based on their "expected score", which is defined as the average of the highest and lowest possible scores they can achieve. According to Nathan, this gives a more accurate picture of who has the best chance of winning the contest than ranking by best-case or worst-case score. All three of these scores will match the current score after the final week, but the best-case scores may change if the expected number of tasks changes.

6. If two or more players are tied for first place at the end of the season, the player who has given the most CPs to the eventual "Celebrity Apprentice" will win. If the players are still tied, the player who has given the most CPs to the runner-up will win, and so on. If the tying entries turn out to be identical, the player who submitted his/her entry first will be ruled the winner.

7. The winner won't receive a trophy, a job, or any other kind of tangible reward, but you can't put a value on the bragging rights over the rest of the group.

Tenatively, contest entries are due Sunday, April 11, 2010, at 6pm Eastern Time. As it stands right now, though, all dates are subject to change.

If you have any questions, e-mail me at tjwuthrich[at]verizon[dot]net. (Again, substitute the proper punctuation for the words in brackets.) Enjoy!
-- Jason Wuthrich

This contest does not now nor will it ever challenge NBC, Mark Burnett Productions, or The Trump Organization for ownership for The Celebrity Apprentice. Special thanks to Nathan Sanders.
For more Certainty Contest action, visit Nathan Sanders's Survivor Contest or Peca Fan's Amazing Race Contest.

Return to the results page or visit the Game Show Warehouse.