I’m a hopeless video game nerd. An addict. To which I will readily admit, without shame but with some regret, to pretty much anyone who asks what I’ve been doing the last four years of my life. My latest shenanigan actually involves the world outside of online video games, in my case the world of Final Fantasy XI (aka FFXI). But only slightly. Whereas most people would throw their money into a company Superbowl or March Madness pool, putting in their 50 bucks with the hopes of picking the right teams and matchups and coming out with a quick grand reward, I’ve done something similar, and yet different enough to seem... atypical. It’s hockey playoffs, my favorite part of the season. And like any good hockey fan, I’ve thrown in my hat and picked my teams in a playoff pool, but instead of tossing in 50 or 100 bucks, I’ve thrown down a figure to the cool tune of 100,000 gil, which just happens to the be currency of Vana’diel, the world within Final Fantasy XI. Not only that, but I’m playing against nine other FFXI players, and the stakes are at nearly 1 million gil.

So far I’m doing pretty good. Pittsburgh swept Ottawa tonight (I picked Pittsburgh to win in five), and almost all my other picks are coming through, though not always at the pace I figured (I’m looking at you Montreal and Detroit). What’s funny though is that out of all of us in the pool, and in a lot of the pro picks as well, only a couple of us picked the Philadelphia Flyers to win over the Washington Capitals, and that’s not sitting well with me. The Flyers won Tuesday night 6-3 at home, 2-0 on Sunday on the road, and lost 5-4 on a late goal by the league’s superstar Alexander Ovechkin last Friday. Arguably, the Flyers have dominated the Capitals, who, on the strength of Ovechkin’s league-high 65 regular season goals and the team’s nine game winning streak on the run to the playoffs, were picked by many to simply mow over the Flyers, whose unevenness over the course of the season was an at-times painful thing for fans to watch. The Flyers have outplayed and outworked the Capitals in every way: defensively, clogging the passing lanes, standing up the Caps offense at the blue line, on the power play and off, shots per game, and, perhaps most importantly, shutting down Alexander the Great, touted by the league to be the face of the future.