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The contest in question is the League of Legends Worlds Pick'ems. Entrants are to rank teams in order of winning probability for both virtual and physical prizes.

As there are a limited number of permutations of team rankings, a strategy I thought of was to gather many valid entrants and systematically choose each permutation so that one person is guaranteed to win the prize.

However, I am unsure if this voids my entry. The closest clause in the Contest rules that disqualifies such strategies is:

Any use of robotic, repetitive, automatic, programmed or similar methods will void all Entries by that Entrant.

However, without any background in law I am unsure if that clause or any other clause applies to my situation.

Will using such strategies void my entry?

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    I’m voting to close this question because Contest rules are not laws. – Trish Oct 1 '20 at 3:46
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    Wouldn't the interpretation of a contract term (that is included in the question) be a reasonable legal question? I'm reading this question as a sort of "does action X violate contract term Y?" question. – Ryan M Oct 1 '20 at 4:23
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That's probably not a violation of that rule...but that's not your biggest problem.

The most reasonable interpretation of that line in the terms is that you can't use a bot or do anything that looks kind of like using a bot. So if you and all your friends used a script to enter your picks for you, that wouldn't be allowed. Manually entering picks based on some predetermined methodology is hardly "robotic, repetitive, automatic, programmed or similar."

Your much larger problem is mathematical, not legal: you'll need 42,467,327 friends (plus yourself) to guarantee a perfect pick. It seems like you need to correctly rank 4 groups of 4 in order, plus correctly guess the result of an additional 7 two-team games, so that's ((4 nPr 4) ^ 4) * 2^7 = 42467328 entries required to cover all possible rankings. Last year, there were 5 million participants (and only one perfect pick among them), so if you get that many people to enter, I'd bet Riot would be more than happy to give you a free computer for advertising their tournament to so many people.

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    Thank you for your answer. As for the large number of permutations, I have discarded very unlikely match results, down to 4 rankings per group. At least for group stage I have 4 ^ 4 = 256 permutations. Although it won't 100% guarantee correct picks, at least the entry aspect is a lot more achievable ;) – George Tian Oct 1 '20 at 9:55
  • That's definitely (a lot!) better, though you'll still have 2^7=128 possibilities for the remainder, requiring a "mere" 32,767 friends, assuming your group-stage prediction is correct :-) – Ryan M Oct 1 '20 at 20:34

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