Hey folks!

In less than four hours from now, I’ll start the (in)famous Guessing Game on the Best Album Bluesky account. What’s that? Read below!

I hope you’ve had a chance to peruse the first 115 albums entered into the upcoming Best Album of 2001 tournament. If not, you can find a list of them right here. Look at the list carefully, because four of those got the most nomination votes of any other album. And if you can correctly guess which four, and in the right order, you can enter any qualifying 2001 album into the tournament!

The Guessing Game will happen on the Best Album Bluesky account (@bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social), today (Sat Feb 7) at noon CST. To play, you’ll need to follow the rules carefully. They are:

1. First things first: the game doesn’t start until I post START on the Bluesky.

2. You only get one guess! (Unless the game goes over an hour; see below.)

3. You are trying to guess the Top 4 nomination getters. #1 got 77 nomination votes, #2 got 72 nomination votes, and at #3 two albums tied with 70 nomination votes. The next album, which you do not need to name, got 61 votes. (That’s not super important; I put it here for context.) Your ballot should list the artist and/or album, from #1 to the #3 albums. Since two albums are tied at #3, you can list those in any order, but the first two need to be the #1 and #2 albums.

4. You can write the full album title, or just the artist, or both, or even abbreviate them, as long it’s clear what albums you’re talking about. An example of an acceptable ballot looks like is below, using 1989 albums. Here, I’ve guessed Jodi Bongiovi, JODI BONGIOVI for #1, W.A.S.P.’s THE HEADLESS CHILDREN for #2, The Call’s LET THE DAY BEGIN and George Strait’s BEYOND THE BLUE NEON tied for #3. I am wrong, and I don’t get to guess again. (Unless the game goes over an hour; see below.)

   

   5. After each guess comes into my notifications, I will retweet (repost, reskeet, whatever) it with either WRONG or CORRECT. Obviously, nearly all of them will be WRONG.

   6. Here’s where it becomes a game: the longer you wait before guessing, the more information you have to make your own guess. At the same time, the longer you wait, the greater chance someone could come along and snipe it out from under you.

   7. This barely counts as a hint, but just in case: the four named albums are all extremely well-known and popular with music aficionados; if you’re the kind of person who participates in music-themed online tournaments, none should come as a surprise.

   8. If at the end of an hour, there is no winner, the game is reset. Everyone gets a new guess. This time, after each retweeting of the guess with a WRONG, I will also offer “Mastermind”-style hints with each guess. I will provide two numbers. The first will be the number of correct albums mentioned in the post, and the second will be the number of correct albums placed in the correct position. For example, if the correct answer is #1 George Strait #2 Milli Vanilli #3 Jodi Bongiovi #3 2 Live Crew, and my guess was

      

Then I would retweet this with “2/0”: 2 because I got two of the artists correct (Jodi Bongiovi and George Strait) and 0 because neither of those are in the correct position.

I think that’s all the rules that need to be covered. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at kentmbeeson@hey.com or contact me at @bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social.

Hope to see you today at noon CST at @bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social!

Kent