I think I’m going to “4 peat” in my money dead pool. Won it every year since joining, so they hate me. A few of them have gotten much better in recent years.
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has anyone listed you as one of their picks for the next year? worse yet, not calling it a tragedy pick? that would be hatred
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This would have been one of my lower-ranked, but still top-15, candidates for 2026. He didn’t make my 2025 list, nor did he make anyone else’s.
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Five days left to get your picks in for the 2026 pool!
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Given the way this year went, I’m confident that if 2025 went another 31 days all of PZ’s non-tragedy picks would have ended up dead.
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There’s still a couple days left.
Khaleda Zia: 
DEAD!
Ms. Zia was a Bangladeshi politician. She was First Lady of Bangladesh after her husband, Ziaur Rahman, became the president in 1977. After his assassination in 1981, Khaleda joined politics and came to lead the Bangladesh Nationalist Party BNP. After a military coup in 1982, she helped lead the movement for democracy. She became the first female prime minister of Bangladesh following the victory of the BNP in the 1991 Bangladeshi general election. She also served as a prime minister during the short-lived and controversial government of 1996, in which most opposition political parties boycotted the election. Subsequently, amid a joint movement by political parties, she was compelled to relinquish power. Her party came to power again in 2001, and she served as prime minister until 2006. In 2007, the military-backed caretaker government charged Zia and her two sons with corruption. In 2018, Zia was sentenced to a total of 17 years in prison for the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case and the Zia Charitable Trust corruption case in 2018. On 27 November 2024, Zia was acquitted in the graft cases. Zia died today at age 80.
PatientZombie gets past the century mark and Maphistos_Sidekick moves up to fourth place.
Standings:
| contestant | Normal Deaths | Tragic Deaths | Unique Deaths | Total Points | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PatientZombie | 10 | 1 | 4 | 104 | |
| Hotkarl | 6 | 1 | 1 | 73 | |
| ArthurItas | 8 | 0 | 2 | 68 | |
| Maphistos_Sidekick | 4 | 1 | 1 | 65 | |
| Ted_Hoffman | 5 | 1 | 0 | 64 | |
| traina | 5 | 0 | 2 | 58 | |
| Macroman | 4 | 0 | 0 | 35 | |
| Ezekial_Cumberland | 3 | 0 | 0 | 21 | |
| frummie | 2 | 0 | 0 | 21 | |
| LastExamDone | 1 | 0 | 1 | 16 |
Keep watching those obits!
If my recollection of my high score is correct, I think Patient Zombie can get credit for a record score.
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I feel way better about my #2 and #3 picks passing on 12/29/25 and 12/31/25 now that it seems it won’t affect the final standings (barring the next 1/2 day).
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I checked all the other celebrities and they are all still alive. The winner of the 2025 Go Actuary Celebrity Death Pool is…
@PatientZombie with an impressive 104 points!
Runner up is @Hotkarl !
A repeat of last years 1-2 finish. 
DFTUYR
See you in the The Rebel Forum Go Actuary 2026 Celebrity Death Pool!
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thank you for doing this. It is the one game I really can’t talk about outside this forum, I get disturbing looks
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Congrats to PZ, and my sympathy to the families of those who made the victory possible.
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Out of curiosity, when preparing my 2026 list, I tried one of the public AI tools to see if it could help make suggestions / automate the research I do to prepare my list.
It took a couple of attempts to get a prompt that passed ethical muster.
Was the information provided by the AI helpful for you?
More importantly, were you on the list?
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Two of the names on my list are ones I wouldn’t have thought of without the AI. However, several of its suggestions were speculative, or the usual collection of very old people – and a couple of already-dead people were recommended.
I’m behind the curve on working with AI, so I’m finding tasks like this to do something about that (mostly out of personal curiosity).
I’m reasonably sure that research and monitoring of news and gossip – the sort needed for a high score – probably can be semi-automated today with the right tool and the right prompts. I just haven’t stumbled on the right combination yet.
I also suspect that you probably could develop a complex prompt about what to look for, where to look for information, and perhaps even how to prioritize names, and get reasonable results with the right tool – but I haven’t gotten past the initial “let me try something right quick and see what happens” stage. My “find information and do something” prompts are in their infancy.
I’d just be happy if I could achieve automation of some of the deep-dive searches I did for a couple of entries, since from December to February I am absolutely slammed with work.
(And for full disclosure, this comment is AI-edited, as an experiment to see if I can create a prompt to get some of my online monologues cleaned up with the results still sounding like me. It’s the first time I’ve done it here. I have some work to do to stamp out anything resembling an em-dash.)
EDIT (human-written): Dagnabbit! The editor in the new forum software parses double-dashes (which I have used for years in my normal sloppy writing) to em-dashes! 
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Congrats to PatientZombie!
I’m quite happy with 6 podium finishes in 7 years.
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My formula for your and Patient 's names and podium finishes ran out of room. I had to increase the number of characters
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