North Bay native Doug Couchie shows off the winning team he submitted to the Toronto Star for the paper's annual hockey pool. His smart picking has made him $1,500 richer.
North Bay native Doug Couchie shows off the winning team he submitted to the Toronto Star for the paper's annual hockey pool. His smart picking has made him $1,500 richer.(Photo by Steve Freyer)
North Bay’s Doug Couchie has won the 2006-2007 Toronto Star Fantasy Hockey Pool’s stand-pat division. With thousands of participants taking part in the annual pool, Couchie, who has entered the pool for nearly 20 years, says he didn’t really have a strategy when he picked his winning team.
“Not really, I just got lucky,” Couchie said with a chuckle from his home Saturday afternoon.
Couchie says general knowledge of the game’s players and going off the points leaders from last year was a help in putting his team together.
The 53 year old Couchie, who has worked for the Union of Ontario Indians for almost three years, says he doesn’t have a favorite team, but has always been a hockey fan and watches games on television whenever they’re broadcasted.
“I always watch hockey. I like to bet on pro-line, so you always keep track of the scores,” Couchie explained.
Entering the pool for almost two decades has been a routine thing for Couchie, but he never would have thought he’d be at the top of the standings when it was all said and done.
“No way, in 20 years I never really came close, so this was really unexpected,” Couchie said, adding that the closest he’s come to winning was when he was in the top 300 people a previous year.
With a month left in the NHL’s regular season, Couchie noticed he was sitting in fifth place in the standings. He says he really started to pay attention to the leader board when he saw he was trailing first place by a slim one point margin with two weeks remaining.
The final posting in the Star’s website updated on Monday, April, 9th, which was a day after the regular season ended, shows that Couchie finished first place with 1,567 points, while the next closest total is 1,562 points. It states in the contest rules, that there’s a one week waiting period until the winners will be named official, just in case there are any discrepancies in points.
Couchie will receive $1,500 for winning the grand prize, but he doesn’t expect to receive anything for about six to eight weeks, as the contest rules states that grand prize winners might wait up to two months to collect their prizes. He doesn’t know when the money will come in. However, he knows what he will do with it when it arrives.
“I’m going to use it to pay bills,” Couchie said.
Although the Toronto Star has misspelled Couchie’s last name in the standings, he joked that he hopes they get his name and address right when they send the cheque.
