2010 Lottery League Draft

The 2010 version of the Lottery League Draft that took place last Friday night at the Beachland Ballroom went off nearly as flawless as the 2008 version that was held at Asterisk Gallery in Tremont. Most of the kinks were worked out beforehand and The Council of Chiefs learned some valuable lessons from LL2008.

Not unlike 2008, names were pulled out of a bingo-hopper with the first round reserved for drummers, half of those being drummers with practice spaces. The drummers without practice space would be paired with a musician from the second round that has a practice space. The next two rounds would be for the remaining musicians not yet picked.

One of the new changes in this year's LL2010 is that the fifth round would be a bonus round of sorts, a representative from 12 randomly picked bands chose a letter or number that spelled out LOTTERY LEAGUE 2010, each of those letters/numbers were assigned a "prize" or a bonus member that may or may not be a musician [I fell into this category/round]. Prizes included a Melt gift certificate, a Rock Hall package and four admissions to the Cleveland Zoo. Bonus members beside myself included Jae Kristoff [The Head Chief of Council], Tony Erba, PJ Doran, Matthew T & Nick Traenkner are a few that I remember.
Also new to this year's draft was a Lottery League Hall Of Fame commemoration that awarded certificates to those Lottery League bands that continued as bands after the 2008 season ended, those bands were: Anal Cheetahs, Mohammad Cartoon [both bands performed at this years draft], Gandhi SS, Stimulus Package & The Valley Of Life. Veteran LL participant and former Tremont Art Auctioneer Joe Milan did a great job as the emcee, I did not hear one complaint about mispronunciation from 150 or so names he called this night. Guest bingo-hopper operators included: Cindy Barber, Kathy Simkoff, Mark Leddy & the Beachland Lady cop. Next up for each band is finding a name and configuring a practice schedule.

LL2010 Draft photos
Lottery League [Official blog]
Lottery League Facebook
Lottery League 2008 Diary

The couple short videos below are from the *bonus-round* that took place in the 5th and final round of the night.

Roxanne and Team 33 won the coveted Tony Erba, not sure if Roxanne was elated or that that She realized that her band drafted another "alpha dog" just like in '08 when Konya was her power drummer in Born Raped.


Rocky takes a club to the pinata only to find Jae Kristoff inside.

Lottery League 2010

By Lou Muenz

Lottery League was started back in 2008 and came from a concept Jae Kristoff created. Long story short: you gather 130+ local musicians together, throw their names into a bingo hopper and create 30+ new bands from the names picked from the hopper. No two people can be in a Lottery League band that performed together previously.
This year's version of Lottery League plans to be just as rewarding and large as the 2008 version but with quite a few new particapants as well as having the draft night open to the public at the Beachland Ballroom this friday night at 9pm.

I spent an iconceivable ammount of time in 2008 documenting nearly every aspect of Lottery League including sitting in on over 60 band practices of 29 of the 33 bands [a handful of bands made it nearly impossible to reach my goal of all 33 bands].
This year Jae has asked me to be part of the process by including myself in the roster of folks that will be in the draft and in a new LL band before the sun rises on saturday. With that said, it was an easy choice for the ClevelandSeen staff to chose me as their Lottery League correspondent.

Within a few days, I will be posting here with photos & video of the draft as well as the rosters of the newly formed bands. You can find the draft list of particapants on the Lottery League blog Jae started in 2008, that is here.

My full documentation of LotteryLeague-I from '08 is here.

Lottery League Draft Night
Friday February 5, 2010
9pm @ The Beachland Ballroom