Spot the Ball competition is a game that promises to reward players with exciting cash prizes and exotic supercars if they can predict the whereabouts of a removed ball in a given football match image.
Simple as that may sound, it’s not an easy task, to be honest. Players often try their lucks time and again but end up missing the exact spot of the ball.
Quick Quiz: Spot the ball
Think you can do better? Try to spot the ball in the figure below:
Not much in the way of luck, right? Don’t beat yourself up. Spot the Ball competitions are just hard like that.
To further complicate matters, competition organizers don’t always go with the actual location from which the ball was yanked off from the picture.
They leave the decision to a group of panelists. It’s believed that the reason for this is to prevent easy guesses for people that might have watched the actual game from which the picture was removed.
In this article, we want to discuss how to play the Spot the Ball game and also some tips for success.
How to Play Spot the Ball
- Visit a Spot The Ball competition website like this one
- Once in, click the “PLAY NOW” button and select the prize you’ll like to win (could be a supercar or lots of money)
- Select how many tickets you want. Each ticket allows you to predict one guess for the location of the ball.
- A football match picture that has no ball will then be displayed
- Determine where the center of the ball is spotted
- Checkout
- At the end of the competition, the judges determine the optimal location of the ball. And the player whose prediction is closest to this location wins the prize!
Tips for winning Spot the Ball competitions
- Pay attention to the players’ eye lines
Once you get the picture, the first thing you need to pay utmost attention to are the players’ eye lines – that’s the direction they’re looking.
This can tell you where the ball is likely to be.
In most cases, you may have many players in a picture, making it difficult to know which player(s) to pay attention to. In this case, observe the direction (eye line) in which at least 60% of the players are facing. This can give you a good guess of where your ball is.
See an example:
We have 14 players in the image above. Per our 60% rule, we’re looking for the eye lines of at least eight players. If you look closely, we have more than eight players looking “up” in this figure. It’s almost as if everyone is looking up, except for a few players looking at their “men.” Chances are the ball is still in the sky in this picture.
My guess? It’s coming towards the white-shirt guy (LHS) on the halfway line.
- Get a ruler
If you’ve watched any live football match analysis or seen Spot the Ball judges analyzing a scenario, then you must have seen some digital rulers in action.
The essence of these rulers is to differentiate the distances between players’ eye lines. You’ll be surprised at how significant a .50 mm distance between two players can be toward identifying the position of a ball.
So, get a ruler, and watch Spot the Ball judging videos to understand how judges use rulers to determine the ball’s flight, positions of players, eye lines of players, and ball positions.
- Watch Spot the Ball judging videos
To win Spot the Ball competitions, you must start watching tons of judging videos.
Note: Judging videos are videos from previous Spot the Ball competitions’ analyses, wherein judges discuss and announce optimal spots of balls.
As we’ve said initially, the actual location from which a ball has been removed is absolutely irrelevant. Instead, it’s the judges who pick where they feel the ball ought to be.
In that case, the message to players is that you need to think like the judges if you want to win. That is, when analyzing each scenario, you need to analyze the way a panelist would.
To do that, you need to watch the judges in action over and over again. Remember, the best way to imitate someone is to study them.
- Feel free to zoom in and out
Just by zooming a picture in, you can discover that a player you thought was looking sideways was actually looking downwards. In the Spot, the Ball world, failure to correctly identify a player’s eye direction can cost you the game.
So, always ensure to zoom in and out of the picture provided. It will help you see everything clearly.
- Don’t play one ticket
The beauty of Spot the Ball games is you have the option to play multiple spots. So, why not use it? Even if you’re so sure of your guess, and you think you’ve identified the optimal spot of the ball, it’s still a wise move to play more than one spot.
In other words, identify two or three spots you think the ball might be. It doesn’t matter if the spots are next to each other. Just make sure you safeguard your interests because you never can tell where the ball’s actual center will be.
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