For Your Morbid Side

Estate planners may help others plan for the inevitable, but they don’t make a game out of it. 

A Dead pool, also called a ghoul pool, is a game where players predict the deaths of celebrities in a given time frame and receive points for correct predictions.  At stiffs.com, players pay $15 to play, with a end-year jackpot worth as much as $3,000.

Determining whether someone qualifies as a celebrity can be a serious matter of debate.   Players wishing to add someone to the celebrity list at Stiffs.com must submit the person’s name to the 30 member fame committee.  The person is added to the game’s celebrity list if five members of the fame committee can identify the person.  

Not a matter of debate, however, is whether points are awarded for hastening the death of a celebrity at issue.  Even morbid games consider murder as cheating.

See Stiffs.comsee also Dead Pool, Wikipedia.  

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.