Today's Insanity, Part Two: Non-Sports Rig-Jobs -- one near-certain one, and one I wouldn't put past...

From time to time, I use this blog to expose various and sundry situations outside the world of sports.

I do this in recognition of that, whether it be sports, television, or other organized competitive events being manipulated (in reality, or the least of plausibility), it all comes from the same place.  The events, to the public, are considered entertainment in which money can be made from the corporate end of things.

Keep this in mind as I examine two events from last weekend -- one from across the pond, and one from the Internet.

First, The X-Factor in the United Kingdom.

We have our Controversial Contestant for this season, and, right off the bat in Week One, Rylan Clark, a 23-year old model, ramped the controversy to 11 with a rave-anthem version of Spandau Ballet's "Gold" in which what you could hear from him wasn't singing and it wasn't clear how much you could hear from him at all!

It was so bad that it almost appeared as if judge Gary Barlow was saying that he would quit the show, with what he did say was that he was having enough fun to justify returning after a tough season last year -- until Rylan started singing.

Rylan, predictably, was one of the bottom two contestants in the first week.

I need to put a number of bullet points out before you see how bad of a debacle this became:

• Each judge has three of the final-phase 12 acts to mentor.  Rylan's judge/mentor is recently-fired-former-US-judge Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls.  People in the US version from last year openly saw Scherzinger going into business for herself so badly that it was clear, by the end, she would not be asked back.
• This is not the first Controversial/Joke Contestant -- the last three years, Louis Walsh (another of the UK judges) had mentored Jedward (a pair of poor singers with enough personality to actually make something of themselves post X-Factor!), Wagner (an older male who just came off as awfully creepy, the longer the show went), and Johnny Robinson (a performing drag queen who could actually sing, but was more content to be funny and flamed out after some of his dirty laundry began making the tabloids).
• In a normal week, elimination goes as follows:  All acts except the bottom two are safe and declared to return next week.  The bottom two acts sing in a Showdown round.  The judges (including the mentor(s) of the two contestants) then can vote to eliminate one act -- as long as at least three of the four agree to do so.  Should a majority fail to do so, the judges are declared in Dead Lock and the public vote is revealed as to which was the lowest vote-getter, eliminating that act.
• Rylan's opponent in the Showdown was Carolynne Poole, a 32 year-old leader of the Carolynne Good Band, who appeared on a previous UK reality show (Fame Academy, placing third).  (One of the reasons all the similar shows are suffering fatigue is that it appears

But that's not all that was on the table last Saturday and Sunday night.

• Clark is gay and very out about it -- and has been the subject of both boycotts and threats for it.
• The public phone lines to vote were actually opened before the start of the show, not (as in past seasons) after all the performances had been shown.
• The main controversy, and the newest of many charges that the show is, in fact, rigged and manipulated, came from the Clark/Poole Showdown round.  A number of different entities reported effectively immediately that, while the two performers sang their songs, the main executive of the UK series was speaking with Louis Walsh.

When the judges were called upon to vote, this was the result.  You can tell by the YouTube likes and dislikes how it was received.

After being prompted 11 times to make his decision by host Dermot O'Leary, Walsh, as the last voter, appeared to vote to send Clark home, eliminating him three votes to one.

However, in a sudden 180, he yells to send the vote to Dead Lock (granting Poole the second vote to force a 2-2 draw), where Poole is eliminated by the public vote.

This prompted Poole's mentor, the same Gary Barlow, to storm off the stage in (at least staged) disgust!

Entertainment, just as the NFL...

Disgraced ex-contestant Johnny Cocozza (who, last year, became the first person ever disqualified out of the final phase for drug use and reference):

 "the X Factor just showed the whole country how set up it is, Not that we didn't know that anyway. The producers fucked it"

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And then we get to the world of video games, and one where I'm not 100% sure exactly WHAT happened.

Tonight, as I type this, is the semifinals (and the remaining game of the quarterfinals) of the League of Legends $2,000,000 Season 2 World Championships.

The bad news was that these games were to be held last Saturday.

What made this happen is largely called the apocalypse of League of Legends.

Why?

There were two major problems.

First was the staging of the live set, where numerous pictures of the event showed conclusively that, had any player in the team booth chosen to do so, he could turn his head and see the other team's minimap, finding out the positions of all the other players, and acting accordingly.

(Yes, there were rules against it, but numerous online parties believed to have evidence that at least half (and probably more!) of the 12 teams in the Championship were taking advantage of this -- a clear disqualification offense...  if Riot (the game's maker, the company putting up the money, and the administrators of the tournament) chose to do so.)

That was bad.  What happened to stop play last Saturday was even worse!

The match in the quarterfinals which had to be rescheduled to finish tonight had to be suspended because the Internet was not able to stay up at LA Live to allow the contest to complete.

First problem:  Riot chose to put the game itself on the Internet, not (as is usual practice in e-sports) on a Local Area Network.

Second problem:  They were never really clear as to what the cause was, leading people to speculate a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the tournament!

And this is where (even as Riot now claims it was a "hardware problem") I begin to wonder openly, given some of the parameters of what was going on, and what we already know does go on in e-sports...

It appeared as if the interruptions, if they were of a nefarious kind (rather than a failure), could've been any of the following:

• Disgruntled contestant, railing against the peeking allegations.
• Disgruntled sponsor of an eliminated team, ditto.
• A sponsor of the losing team in the games/matches which were going on.
• Or, worse, since we know that e-sports matches are being bet upon (AND FIXED!) in various parts of the world, that a large-scale bettor learned of the vulnerabilities Riot put in when they left the tournament on the Internet and chose to tamper the result...
• Or it could've been Riot themselves!  They were certainly getting enough viewership of the tournament (Riot claimed that, at one point over the weekend, their LoL World Championship streams were taking up 5% of the entire bandwidth capacity in North America!) that they could've pulled an NFL and decided to orchestrate this (they certainly came across as inept or as incompetent as the NFL replacement refs did!) to get an extra night out of this...

But am I suspicious?  You betcha.

Do I know if something went down?  No.