This Week in Hockay: September 20th
Thirty-six matchdays are in the record. Ten are not, and the first of those is being played as this dispatch goes out.
The table did most of the week's work this time. The two teams at the top of La Conférence du Verglas won everything they were asked to win and moved not at all relative to one another, ten teams in La Conférence du Givre finished inside four points, and neither conference resolved anything. Away from the ice, an Institute nobody consulted weighed a sheet of ice, a kcup quadrupled, and some citizens received a letter. Le Council reports all of it.
Nothing Moved At The Top
Winnipeg Wendigos won six of seven. Medellín Mapaches won six of seven. Both took twelve points from the week, which is the most a team can take from seven nights without winning all of them, and neither gained a single point on the other.
Winnipeg finish the thirty-sixth matchday on 30-5-1, 61 points. Medellín finish on 28-5-3, 59. The gap between them was two points a week ago. It is two points now.
Each lost once, and each loss is worth recording.
Winnipeg's came at home on the 18th, 0-2 to Montréal Maples, who did not concede and did not need to score twice. Medellín's came at La Ladera on the 19th, 1-3 to McMurdo Monoliths, in the game where the boards rang. Both leaders were beaten at home, on consecutive nights, by teams below them.
Montréal have now won six straight and climbed from eleventh to seventh on 44, closing with a 2-0 over Tahiti on the 19th. Tokyo Titans hold third on 49, Phuket Podcasters fourth on 48, Busan Blizzards fifth on 47. São Paulo Serpents won two of seven and fell from third to sixth.
Seventh is the last place that clinches outright, and Montréal hold it by one point. Behind them, Perth Pyres, McMurdo Monoliths and Tahiti Tsunami are level on 43, in that order and on goal differential alone: the two seats that meet in the Wildcard and the first team standing outside it, separated by nothing whatsoever.
Barbados Barracudas did not win a game this week. They took three points from seven nights, all of them in overtime, and fell from seventh to eleventh. A week ago Le Council reported them holding a clinching place. Le Council reported at the same time that nothing about eighth place is guaranteed.
Ten Teams, Four Points
Nairobi Narwhals lead La Conférence du Givre on 23-6-7, 53 points. Oslo Owls are on 25-10-1, 51. Oslo have won more games than anybody in the conference, and for the second week running they are two points behind a team that has won two fewer. Nairobi have seven overtime losses and Oslo have one, and that gap of six is the whole of the difference.
Both were beaten by the same team, on consecutive days, by five goals and three. Atlantis Amonites won at Oslo 5-0 on the 14th and beat Nairobi 5-2 at home on the 15th, and went 6-1 for the week, matching the best record in the league and bettering every goal difference in it, climbing from sixteenth to ninth. Their week ended 0-2 at Helsinki on the 19th.
Samarkand Seagulls hold third on 47 and Helsinki Howlers fourth on 45. Then the table stops separating. Chengdu Cranes and Kyiv Kestrels are on 43, Amsterdam Aardvarks and Johannesburg Jaguars on 42, and Atlantis, Monaco Moose, Dublin Dragons, Rimini Rinklers and Tehran Tigers—five teams, ninth place through thirteenth—are all on 41.
That is ten teams inside four points, holding fourth place down to thirteenth, with ten matchdays left. The last seat that clinches outright and the two that meet in the Wildcard are covered by a single point. Dublin climbed three places this week; Tehran, who sat fourth a week ago, fell nine.
Prague Phantoms did not win either. They took one point from seven nights, conceded eighteen more than they scored, were shut out twice—0-5 at home to Mumbai on the 15th and 0-5 at Lagos on the 19th—and fell from eleventh to nineteenth.
One more feature of the table, which Le Council has now reported three weeks running and explained not once. Two weeks ago the first seven places in league scoring belonged to defenders. Last week it was the first thirteen. This week it is the first fifteen. Leah Blacksmith of Winnipeg leads on 35 points, ahead of Valentina Colombo of Rimini on 34 and Amara Osei of Nairobi on 33. The first forward on the list is Kaya Bearclaw of Winnipeg, in a four-way tie for sixteenth.
There were six hat tricks this week, and four belonged to defenders: Pieter Botha in Johannesburg's 9-2 over Vladivostok on the 15th, Valentina Colombo in Rimini's 8-4 at Mumbai on the 14th, Jonas Bakke in Oslo's 3-1 at Lagos on the 15th, and Kiran Bhatt in Mumbai's 5-0 at Prague on the 15th. Of the two that belonged to forwards, one was Tomáš Novák of Prague, in a 3-5 loss at Rimini on the 16th. It is the only hat trick Prague have to show for the season.
The week's loudest scorelines were both thirteen goals: Tokyo won 9-4 at Havana on the 13th, and Tahiti won 7-6 at Busan on the 16th.
Twenty Percent, Exactly Twenty Percent
On the 12th, Graine Wetsky Funds told all forty-eight registers that the Recovery Assembly had been rebuilt deeper, that a period-end now yields between 1,000 and 2,000 kcups, and that their share off the top had doubled from ten percent to twenty. Le Council checked every claim in that notice and found each of them correct, and said so the same day.
Le Council has now watched the terms run for a full week, which is a different thing from checking them once.
811,211 kcups came off the boards across the seven days in the record. 647,380 of them were bought by citizens. 163,831 went to the Funds. That is 20.2 percent, which is twenty percent, which is what was filed. Le Council has nothing to add to the arithmetic and does not intend to publish it weekly.
The consequence is the part worth recording. The Funds' holding stood at 238,661 Ⓚ when they wrote to the registers on the 12th. It stood at 410,399 Ⓚ at midnight on the 19th. Nothing irregular produced that. A standing share of a deeper assembly produced it, in seven days, in public, exactly as described.
Le Council records, as it did last week, that the Funds have said what they are doing and have not said what it is for.
What A Sheet Weighs
At 00:00 UITC on the 16th, the Royal Institute for Nascent Kinetics published a bulletin that nobody requested, on a question nobody asked, and stood behind it.
One regulation sheet of ice is 1,012,800 kcups of Ice Shavings.
R.I.N.K. measured the displacement of a Puck at 115.825 cubic centimetres, took Le Council's building standard of 61.0 metres by 30.0 metres at 25 millimetres, and arrived at 394,992 kcups of solid ice. Settled shavings, R.I.N.K. reports across eleven hundred sample cups drawn from nine buildings, carry 0.390 of the density of the sheet that produced them. The p-value is 1. R.I.N.K. considers this satisfactory.
R.I.N.K. closed by noting that at the rate of the 15th, the material required to pour one sheet crosses the boards of Hockay in eleven days. Le Council's count for the seven days in the record makes it a little under nine. Nothing was left over on any of those days. Every kcup the boards offered this week was bought.
R.I.N.K.'s number arrived in a week when the price of the unit was moving. Le Marché Gelé settled twenty deals this week that were Looneys against kcups and nothing else. On the 13th a kcup went for Ⱡ2,500. From the 17th onward, four of them settled at exactly Ⱡ10,000—four times the week's floor, and half as much again as the highest price Le Council reported a week ago.
At Ⱡ10,000, a regulation sheet of ice costs Ⱡ10,128,000,000.
Graine Wetsky Funds hold 410,399 kcups. That is two-fifths of a sheet.
The Counter, And The Room
The Confrérie Artistique pour la Reproduction et la Distribution struck 16,590 cards this week, bringing the run to 31,488 since the counter opened ten days ago. 15,368 were handed back, and the Confrérie paid Ⱡ352,842 for the lot, which is about twenty-three Looneys a card. Sixty-one of the recycled cards were Legendary. Forty-seven carried print number one.
3,039 Blisters were bought this week by 48 citizens for Ⱡ2,417,750, and 648 of them have not been opened. Three more teams got a counter of their own on the 16th—Gander, Amsterdam and Busan—which brings the number of teams with a Blister to thirteen.
The rate at which a card is handed back falls in an unbroken line through the tiers. The Confrérie has struck 15,817 Commons and been given back 14,819 of them, which is ninety-four percent. Uncommons come back at ninety, Rares at seventy-six, Epics at fifty. Of the 572 Legendaries ever struck, seventy-four have been recycled, which is thirteen percent.
What is left in the binders of Hockay, accordingly, is 1,316 Rare, 1,193 Epic, 998 Common, 698 Uncommon and 498 Legendary. The commonest card in Hockay is no longer the Common.
Le Marché Gelé settled 80 deals, against sixty-three last week. Fifty-seven of them involved a card. Seventeen citizens sold and twenty-three bought, and almost every note attached to an offer was addressed to somebody by name.
- 250,000 shares of the Zanzibar Zebras, bundled with three Legendary cards, went for Ⱡ100,000,000 on the 16th. The following night another 55,475 Zanzibar shares and three more Legendaries went for 10,000 kcups, which at the price the week ended on is the same money. Zanzibar sit sixteenth in the Givre.
- A foil Rare of Elina Heikkinen, print number nine, went for Ⱡ1,200, under the note "For jeremy."
- Thirty ceremonial donations moved 7,990,563 shares with nothing asked in return, and Ⱡ1,530,382,693 paid in fees to do it.
On the Exchange itself, Helsinki Howlers doubled, from Ⱡ3,422 to Ⱡ6,905. Atlantis rose 92 percent and Chengdu 74. Gander Geese fell 70 percent, Prague 68, Stockholm Sirens 60, and Montréal Maples 59—in the week Montréal won six of seven and shut out the leaders of their conference. Le Council notes that the Exchange does not read the table. The Exchange reads what citizens do.
All Five Grades
Eleven entries joined the register this week. It runs to thirty-eight entries across eight parishes. No ninth parish has appeared.
Two phenomena entered the register for the first time. The Ice Went Clear arrived on the 14th at The Remote Range, for 10.1 seconds, and was recorded twice more—in McMurdo again on the 18th for 7.5 seconds, and at The Still Strait in Stockholm on the 19th for 11.4. The Cold Came Up arrived on the 17th at The Golden Arch in Kyiv, at six degrees, in the game Kyiv won 3-2 against Nairobi.
The rest were things the register knows. The Shockwave three times—Kyiv on the 13th at 18 millimetres, Stockholm on the 14th at 11, Kyiv again on the 19th at 12. The Net Levitated in Stockholm on the 16th, 32 centimetres. The Boards Rang at La Ladera on the 19th, at 181 hertz, in the game Medellín lost.
Le Council reported last week that all four of that week's entries came in games the home team went on to lose. Seven of this week's eleven came in games the home side won. Le Council withdraws nothing and explains nothing.
Two names were added. Yurii Danylenko of Kyiv was Wrapped on the 15th, for 8.2 seconds. Claudia Pérez of Havana was Frostbitten on the 19th, for 1.9 seconds—the first Frostbitten anywhere on the register, and the bottom of the scale. Seven names now stand on it, and for the first time every one of the five grades is represented: Enveloped, Wrapped, Touched, Blanched, Frostbitten. Le Council has the list and offers no reading of it.
Kyiv recorded four entries in seven days. The register now stands at ten for McMurdo, eight for Kyiv, seven for Stockholm, and fewer than four everywhere else.
The parishes consecrated 223,588 Ⓚ this week, down from 273,766. McMurdo's roll reached 330,000, on 98,895 kcups from five citizens. Gander's stands at exactly 250,000, on 40,000 from one.
The Notices Have Gone Out
A Petition to Begin Limiting Absentee/Zombie Encumbrance of Investment Tranches, filed by Ragnaroknrol, carried on the 11th and was enacted on the 14th. Le Council's ruling acknowledged the legal craftsmanship on display, declined to examine the cited provisions too closely, and set the terms out plainly.
A citizen who has not collected a daily reward in thirty-five consecutive days is served a Notice of Abandonment. They have seven days to appear. If they do not, their shares return to the pool.
The provision is automatic, and it is already running. Notices were served this week, to citizens whose holdings have sat untouched long enough to meet the threshold. Le Council will not publish who they are, how many there are, or what they hold. A Notice is a private letter and Le Council intends to keep it one.
Nothing has been forfeited. If a Notice reached you, collecting a daily reward rescinds it, and that is the whole of what is required. Le Council will report the first forfeiture when there is one to report, and not before.
Le Council's ruling closes: "The pool will not shrink. The Ice cools all things. The shares will keep moving."
No new filing was admitted this week. All three open petitions gained ground and none reached threshold. The Julius Caesar Petition, filed by Gommetrik, doubled to 99 of 200 Seals, with until the 1st of October. On the Matter of Idols, filed by Ilias, doubled to 70 of 250, with until the 1st of November. One Man's Trash, filed by Orangecheetah, went from one Seal to 31 of 100, with until the 12th of October. All three have cleared their Looney floors.
Le Council enacts on arrival at threshold and offers no forecast before then.
A Note From O.D.D.S.
Citizens settled 2,475 bets this week and staked Ⱡ614,504,887,897. The book returned Ⱡ665,275,357,361.
O.D.D.S. does not speculate. O.D.D.S. calculates. O.D.D.S. lost Ⱡ50,770,469,464.
That is the week. Winnipeg and Medellín each won six of seven, each were beaten at home, and finished exactly as far apart as they started. Montréal won six straight and shut out the leaders; their shares fell by more than half. Ten teams in the Givre are inside four points of one another. Atlantis beat both conference leaders in two days. The first fifteen scorers in the league are defenders. R.I.N.K. weighed a sheet of ice at 1,012,800 kcups and a kcup quadrupled to Ⱡ10,000, which prices a sheet at ten billion Looneys. The Funds took their twenty percent, exactly their twenty percent, and are now two-fifths of the way to a sheet of their own. The register learned two new phenomena, two new names, and its fifth and last grade. Notices have gone out to citizens who stopped turning up, and none of them has lost anything yet.
Thirty-six matchdays are in the record. Ten are not.
Stick around.