Joyous, or at least as joyous as he’s capable of getting, at watching his bet on Ivanovic to score last in the Europa League final coming good, Aidan wanted to commit further genius betting ideas to something more reliable than his alcohol soaked memory.

As he waited on the barman to finish pouring another round of Jaeger bombs, the phone came out and his all new, super accurate Speech-to-Text app was employed. All one is required to do is talk in to your phone and the app will convert your face noises in to bonafide, readable words. Simple. Why would anyone ever go to the effort of typing or writing anything ever again?

This is why:

Either the creators of the app still have some bugs to work out or Aidan lied about how coherent he was at the time. Your job is to try and decipher these garbled bet ideas. We’ll tell you what sport each bet is on and you have to tell us the exact selection Aidan wanted to record.

Bet 1: Football
Bet 2: Football
Bet 3: Football
Bet 4: Horse Racing
Bet 5: Rugby Union

Every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn we’ll add an extra euro/pound to the total. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it.

The winner will be whoever gets the most correct answers right (it pretty much needs to be the whole answer, not just bits of it to be right). In the event we get more than one person tied on the same number of correct answers, the winner shall be drawn from Aidan’s hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Monday May 20th and Aidan will announce the winner soon after.

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘I’m not sure if this is a rash or something more sinister’. The inclusion or exclusion of a subject line will make absolutely no difference to your entry.

You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact Aidan, you can do so using the Twitter machine where he’s @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and remember the time when Home Alone was found in the ‘new releases’ section on your local VHS rental shop.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Liverpool competition #EyeOnThePrize

Footballers always talk about how they play for the fans. Now they get to do just that, with Paddy Power. We Hear You!

We are giving three real fans the chance to have three Liverpool FC stars win prizes for them by hitting targets on the pitch. The fans get to watch the competition as it takes place at Melwood Training Ground.

Paddy Power will pick three customers who have registered Liverpool FC as their favourite team on our Team Pages. These Paddy Power customers need to enter via the competitions@paddypower.com email address, as instructed further below.

HOW TO ENTER #EYEONTHEPRIZE

1. Be a Liverpool FC fan! Make sure you’ve registered Liverpool FC as your team on Paddy Power’s Team Pages.
2. Tell Paddy Power in 30 words or less how much you love LFC and why you deserve to win a place in this competition. Pictures are also accepted as part of this entry.
3. Please include your Paddy Power account username.

Email competitions@paddypower.com before 3pm on Friday, April 19.

If you have not already done so, you can register Liverpool FC as your favourite team on PaddyPower.com by clicking here…

Our exclusive #EyeOnThePrize competition highlights Paddy Power’s Team Pages which are available for your favourite team from the Premier League to Conference.  What do our Team Pages offer you?

• The chance to take part in competitions like this with Premier League stars!
• Exclusive stats, enhanced offers and Justice Payouts you won’t get anywhere else.

Ts&Cs

• Paddy Power will contact three winning customers on or by 5pm on Friday, April 19, 2013.
• These winners must be available to travel to Liverpool and be filmed as part of the competition at Melwood Training Ground, Deysbrook Lane, West Derby, Liverpool, on Tuesday, April 23, 2013.
• To be eligible to win a place in the competition, customers must have registered their team page between April 2012 and Friday, April 19, 2013.
• Three Liverpool FC players will be assigned to our customers. One customer will be assigned one player. Who gets to shoot for a prize first will be decided on location.
• Winners will be asked for a picture of themselves for use on a t-shirt to be worn by the Liverpool FC player shooting for them on the day.
• A video of the competition will be used by Liverpool Football Club on their social channels and by Paddy Power.
• You must be a Paddy Power customer and 18 years of age or over to enter (You can sign-up for a Paddy Power account at www.paddypower.com)
• Paddy Power decision is final.
• Dates and time subject to change.

A glitch with the image may have allowed some to see the final image prematurely. Without proof or the desire to find proof I’ll simply be correcting the issue for tomorrow’s competition and congratulating Kenneth for finding the grift.

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The problem with such a long running and popular quiz like our world famous Catchphrase competition is that every year we’re compelled to come up with a brand new set of images to depict phrases we haven’t used before. Which is getting increasingly tougher as the years tumble by.

Only a late flurry of caffeine fueled, unhinged creativity has saved the day this year. However it does mean that this year’s catchphrase games may be the most surreal yet. I’ve steeled myself for a torrent of abuse to be thrown my way when I finally release the answer.

The good news is you get the chance to win a £/€50 free bet for playing a guessing game in between making your bets and watching the racing.

Well let’s get to it. Here’s how it works.

Now start your guessing!

Bragging rights over your mates. Maybe a couple of pints down the pub on Friday night. A few weeks in the good books of your other half. There’s quite a few benefits to being an awesome Cheltenham Festival 2013 tipster, but none of them sounds as good as £5,000 in cash.

Here’s your chance to show off your tipping skills, your extensive knowledge of form and bask in a glow of superiority. Or you could just fluke picking winners all week by choosing them on funny names and pretty colours and you’d top the leaderboard. Either way is good.

Simply register for free in Paddy Power’s Cheltenham Naps Competition and make your choices each day.

It’s not just about picking favourites though, that would be far too easy and the last thing we need is Alex Hammond winning this competition. This game is about a healthy mix of long shots and short favourites and getting the balance right is key to cashing in on the £5k.

You get 20 points for a 20/1 winner, 10 points for a 10/1 winner, one point for a winner at evens and so on. Just keep nailing the winners and it is happy days.  

The top 20 tipsters each day will win prizes including a top prize of £500 with the overall Festival winner collecting a tidy £5,000. There’s some decent prizes for the runners-up as well although you won’t get the same amount of praise from your friends and we won’t give you any kind of kudos on the Blog.

You’ve got a few more days to plough through the form guides and make your selections. Some top tipping this week can pay for your next holiday, some handy gadgets or a night out that would make Charlie Sheen jealous.

Register here to enter the Paddy Power Cheltenham Naps tipping competition

A lucky rain dance in your jocks on the roof chanting Jezki’s name?

Praying to the racing Gods next to a shrine dedicated to Barry Geraghty and Nicky Henderson?

Sneaking out of your cousin’s wedding to do study form in the bog?

Where will you watch the Cheltenham Festival?

Show Paddy Power your best videos using the brilliant new Vine app and you’ll have the chance to win a £100 free bet and the admiration of the Paddy Power office, your family and friends.

What is Vine?

Vine is a downloadable app that lets you create and share short videos. Six seconds, to be precise so there is no messing around. It’s the new in-thing all the cool kids love so jump on the band-wagon now. Otherwise you’ll be that person stood in the corner of the room at a party with nobody to talk to because everyone else loves Vine.

Click here for some examples of Vines people have created. To be honest, yours will need to be considerably funnier and a lot more mental to win the free bets, this is just to give you an idea of how Vine works.

So what do I need to do to cash in on those free bets?

• Tweet @paddypower a Vine video showing where you plan to watch the Cheltenham Festival, or where you are watching it.
• Use the original hashtag #LuckyPants.

It sounds so easy even Joey Essex could figure it out, but remember to download the Vine app first.

Once you have tweeted your entry you will be automatically put up on our flash-looking leaderboard. Your position on the board is determined by how many retweets you receive so clearly having a few willing friends to give you some votes is handy. This is what’s up for grabs if you tickle the Twitter-sphere.

1st £100 free bet
2nd £50 free bet
3rd £30 free bet
4th £30 free bet
5th £30 free bet

Paddy Power’s Vine Vid Leaderboard

Remember, the funnier and more surreal your video is the more likely it is to get supported on the leaderboard and you’ll be in with a chance of winning. Please try to keep them clean though. Our mums read the Blog and the last thing we need them seeing is you sticking a firework up your arse and chanting ‘Come on, Overturn’. That not only endangers your life but the horse is awful too.

TOP OF THE WORLD: Feel like Rocky with these expert tips on how to be the Last Man Standing

By Josh Powell | Sports writer

Thousands entered Paddy Power’s Last Man Standing which began in August 2012. Most were beaten, but eight people fought on avoiding the freak results, and choosing teams wisely. By the last weekend of 2012 all eight lost in battle but were rewarded with a tasty €1,250 each from the prize-pot to kick-start the new year with a bang.

Anyone can enter Last Man Standing and there’s €2,000 up for grabs in this weekend’s tournament. Enter here.

The Paddy Power Blog spoke to one of the winners to find out exactly what it takes to be a champion and learn some of the skills necessary to navigate a competition some say is trickier than trying to convince Chelsea fans that Rafa is the right man for the job.

Last Man Standing champ and all-round nice guy Declan Boland, from Dublin, slogged through 17 weeks of gruelling tournament action until he could be crowned the victor, and now you can get a head-start in this week’s competition with his top three tips.

1. Check out the form and don’t hesitate to pick a banker, even if it looks obvious
2. Always keep up to date with injuries and suspensions BEFORE you pick a team
3. If in doubt, go with your gut

Simple really, even Joey Essex could get his head around this one.

The rules for Last Man Standing are simple. Each week you have to pick the winner of one Premier League match. Draw or lose and you’re out, but if they win, congratulations: you have made it through to the next round.

A key point is that you may not pick the same team to win more than once during the tournament, but as Declan pointed out when he spoke to us, you could always side with the teams playing clubs like QPR and Reading, if you haven’t already used them.

As the name suggests, if you are the Last Man Standing, then the money is all yours and the drinks are on Paddy!

Last year Paddy forked out a staggering €75,000 to the winners of Last Man Standing. Declan is just one of many punters to have battled his way to some cold, hard cash.

With his expert tips and sound advice, you could soon be €2,000 richer and the proud owner of the title ‘Last Man Standing’ champion’?

• Enter Last Man Standing here

As ever, the Leopardstown Christmas Festival will feature some of the biggest names in jumps racing competing for some of the biggest prizes of the season. From the Lexus Chase to the Istabraq Festive Hurdle via the Paddy Power Dial-A-Bet Chase, it’s four days jam-packed with quality racing, schmoozing and a healthy slice of festive cheer.

Oh, it begins on December 26. That’s St Stephen’s Day to us Paddies, and Boxing Day to you Brits.

We sent Josh the Paddy Power Christmas Elf down to top trainer Noel Meade’s yard to see how preparations were going. He caught up with the trainer who saddled Cross Appeal to victory in last year’s Paddy Power Chase and also had chinwags with racing siblings Paul and Nina Carberry.

To celebrate Josh getting banned from being within a 20 miles radius of Noel Meade’s house, we’ve got five pairs of tickets to Paddy Power Chase Day at Leopardstown and 100 pairs of Paddy Power Lucky Pants to give away. To be in with your chance of winning, simply answer the following question:

Who won the Paddy Power Dial-A-Bet Chase in 2008, 2010 and 2011?

(a) Big Zeb
(b) Big Tom and the Mainliners
(c) Bigot

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com along with the subject line ‘I support this shameless plug for Paddy Power and Leopardstown’ before midday on Wednesday, December 26 and we’ll announce the winners of the tickets not long after. Please include your Paddy Power username or a valid email address in your answer as we may need to contact you if you’re lucky.

Conditions

• One entry per person
• Winners will be drawn at random
• Paddy Power decision is final

For more on the Leopardstown Christmas Festival see their official site, here.

We hope this isn’t your Christmas scene. But if you’re facing dry turkey, recycled films on TV, rubbish presents, or spending more time than you’d like with family members, we can help.

Yes, if your Xmas is Pants, Paddy Power can make it better. Big time.

We have exclusive Champions League Final tickets to give away as part of our #XmasIsPants promotion.

Here’s what Paddy is offering…

• Four pairs of Champions League Final tickets (Two pairs on Facebook, two pairs on Twitter)
• 1000 pairs of Paddy Power Lucky Pants

All you have to do to be in with a chance to win is SHARE your rubbish Christmas experience with us. UPLOAD your sorry Christmas snaps to our Xmas is Pants Facebook app, or TWEET your piece of festive misery to #XmasIsPants.

You can enter right here on our brand spanking new Facebook app: http://pdy.pr/FuF8T6

Tweets could be anything from a 140 character ode to your Xmas nightmare in carol form, to videos or photos of Xmas disasters and anything in between. If you convince us your Xmas was indeed a load of pants, we’ll make it up to you by sending you one of 1000 pairs of PP Lucky Pants, and you might even be on your way to the Champions League Final with a friend.

Paddy Power Ts&Cs 

How to enter

Entry details below for Facebook and Twitter

Entrants must agree to the terms and conditions to be entered.

The photos will be passed for approval by Paddy Power.
Paddy Power reserves the right to refuse publication of any photo.

Paddy Power reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, this Promotion with or without prior notice due to reasons outside its control.

This competition is only open to individuals aged 18 years and over.

Entry into this competition is free.

Entrants may enter more than once but prizes are limited to one pair of Paddy Power Lucky Pants per entrant.

The competition closes at midnight 31st December 2012 and no votes will be counted after this date.

The winners will be notified within 7 days of the competition closing.

Paddy Power will cover one night’s accommodation in London and travel costs (up to £150 per person) for the winner + 1 friend for the Champions League Final.

If overnight accommodation is required, this will be booked and paid for by Paddy Power.

This competition is open only to residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

By entering this promotion you agree that Paddy Power PLC may use your information to contact you about products and services you may like. You can change your direct marketing preferences by contacting us on support@paddpower.com. By entering this promotion you also agree that Paddy Power PLC may use your entry in or as promotional material.

This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook.  Facebook is in no way responsible for any aspect of this promotion including its fulfillment.

There is no cash alternative to the prize and the prize is non-refundable and non-transferable.

Paddy Power reserves the right to substitute the prize for a prize of equivalent or greater monetary value if this is necessary for reasons beyond its control.

Except in the case of death or personal injury arising from its negligence or in respect of fraud and so far as is permitted by law, the Promoter and its associated companies and agents exclude responsibility and all liabilities arising from any postponement, cancellation, delay or changes to the prize details beyond the Promoter’s control and for any act or default of any third party supplier.

The terms and conditions of any other third party supplier will also apply to the prize where applicable.  If there is a conflict between third party terms and conditions and these terms and conditions, these shall take precedence.

The Promoter will not be liable for any prize(s) that do not reach the winners for reasons beyond the Promoter’s reasonable control.

The name, country and photograph of the winners may be used by the Promoter and its associated companies for post-event publicity purposes. The winners agree to allow the Promoter to use their name and likeness for advertising and publicity purposes without additional remuneration.

Facebook

The winner of the 2 x tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final on May 25^th at Wembley Stadium will be decided by the photo entry which has received the most votes via the Paddy Power ‘Xmas is Pants Facebook App’ during the competition. In the event of a tie, whereby two photos have an equal number of votes when the competition closes, then the final decision will rest with Paddy Power. Sample pictures are excluded from the competition.

Twitter

Valid entries must include the hash tag #XmasIsPants or they will not be taken into consideration. The winner of the 2 x tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final on May 25^th at Wembley Stadium will be decided by Paddy Power.

Last week’s competition proved to be tougher than I had expected. I had thought pretty much everyone would guess who our Santas were, but I was proven more wrong than someone who thought Jimmy Saville was just a generous guy with a big heart.

The answers were:

#1 Dan Carter of All Black fame
#2 David Beckham, celebrity and occasional footballer
#3 Victoria Pendleton not particularly good ballroom dancer and former Team GB cycling legend
#4 Frankie Dettori – top jockey and recently snared drug taker
#5 Sachin Tendulkar – legendary Indian cricketer who has kept playing about a year too long
#6 Victoria Azerenka – number one women’s tennis player in the world.

No-one got the full house six out of six and in fact only one person got five out of six. That means my quiz-ending Santa hat of mystery gets a rest this week and the whole £75 Free Bet is winging it’s way towards Chris Keenan, who must win some sort of award for perseverance if not an award for recognising Sachin Tendulkar. No Chris, it’s not one of the Klitschkos, not matter how many times you say it.

Well done Chris and bad luck and bad identifying sports people everyone else. There’s more competition fun on the way soon.

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Ho ho ho!
No, the Kardashian sisters haven’t walked into the Paddy Power offices, that’s merely me trying to get into the festive spirit.

Yes, it’s that special time of the year when we like to forget all about restraint, moderation and decorum and instead eat, drink and talk crap until we fall over in a heap of cranberry sauce and Santa hats.

In honour of that fact, this week’s competition has Yuletide flavour. Recently we’ve been looking to recruit a Santa to give out presents (shots of sambuca) and spread Christmas cheer (sexually suggestive comments) at the Paddy Power Christmas party. We auditioned a lot of famous sportspeople for the role and we’ll announce the winner shortly.

In the meantime, we’re giving you a look at the candidates’ screentests. All you need to do is identify the badly Photoshopped sporting celebrities in the Santa costumes below. There’s six in total, some very easy and others just easy. There are no really obscure personalities hiding beneath the beards, they’re all well-known to anyone to a small to middling interest in sport.

Don’t worry if you have failing eyesight, if you click on the image, you’ll see a bigger version.

Competition

Send your six answers to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘I detest restraint, moderation and decorum’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but please note that only your most recent guess will count. So if you happened to get six out of six first time out, then have a rethink and only get five out of six – tough marzipan – that one is gonna count.

This week’s edition is for the prize of a £/E50 Free Bet. But that’s not all. The prize will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted:

FEELING LUCKY? There's a Free €/£50+ Bet to be won on this festive competition: pdy.pr/QD9v4q Retweet to increase the prize ; )—
Paddy Power Blog (@paddypowerblog) December 11, 2012

Or also every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the event we get more than one person with all sixr correct answers, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday December 18 and I’ll announce the winner soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerBlog.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and remember the time when Home Alone was found in the ‘new releases’ section on your local VHS rental shop.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Right, let’s start off with a double apology. First up, sorry about not replying to your queries in the comments section over the course of the last week. My arms were in a cast after an overly enthusiastic rendition of Gangnam Style went wrong at a Christmas party. Secondly, sorry – last week’s competition was tough. Way tougher than I actually intended.

A handful of people managed to crack open the nebulous trifle that is my head and provided all four answers, but before all that, here’s my attempt to justify the supposed logic behind my thinking:

#1 That’s Top Gear’s resident geek, James May; that’s a pub, sometimes referred to by pretentious people like me as an ‘inn’; that’s some seats on an airplane, commonly known as a ‘row’; that is Megan Fox in her undergarments on a billboard and a billboard is more generally classified as an ‘ad’.

If you got those cryptic clues, you may have stuck them all together and got Maine Road – former home of the coin-throwers of Manchester City and still in fact a road, if not a stadium.

#2 It’s tricky, but that picture of someone getting overpriced petrol is suppose to represent ‘filling’ or ‘to fill’ your car; then there’s Mel Gibson playing Hamlet probably saying something anti-semitic to a ‘skull’; the final picture is the brilliant Ari Gold from Entourage (I’m not sure why he’s holding a massive water-pistol.

Piece them together and hopefully you got Phil Scolari, former Chelsea manager and newly appointed manager of Brazil.

#3 That’s a candle, but in particular the ‘wick’; that’s some woman doing something known as beachcombing or to ‘comb’ the beach; that’s Harry Potter and he’s got his wand in his hand (stop giggling); that final picture is an exam, but as the red marks are intended to communicate the notion of ‘errors’.

Put them altogether (and use some creative license) and you should have landed upon Wycombe Wanderers

#4 That’s Michael Jackson, or as he probably liked to be called in certain situations, Mickey; that’s Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, but there’s more than one Mao, so you might say there’s Maos; they’re a pair of hands, but they’re more specifically cupped in the shape of a ‘cup’.

That’s supposed to represent the phrase Mickey Mouse Cup, a label you could apply to many competitions, but I intended as a dig at the ever pointless Capital One Cup.

As I said before, there were a few correct answers, so many that I had to dust down my hat of quiz-ending jeopardy and throw all the people with a full house in. After giving all the names a good shuffle, the one that popped out belongs to Paul Meyers. Thanks to everyone’s sharing this competition on the various social media, he wins a Free £116 Bet. Well done Paul, you deserve it for being so bloody smart. Bad luck everyone else, especially if you happened to be one of the very few other people who got 4/4.

There’s more, less difficult competition fun on the way.

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Sorry there was no competition last week. I was over at the Emirates Stadium collecting an award for creating the ‘Best Blog In The World. Ever’ (that may not actually have been title of the category). I know I have previous when it comes to making up outlandish excuses to explain why I didn’t do a competition last week, but that’s not one of them. It’s true. Stop laughing. We won an award and everything. I got drunk and then fell asleep on my hotel bed with a full bottle of water that spilled everywhere and it looked like I wet the bed. But I didn’t. Honest mum.

Anyhoo, I’m back now and hopefully that mattress has dried off so it’s time for a little bit of The Competition With No Name in your life. If you haven’t played before, don’t let the lack of a catchy title put you off.

It’s simple. Well, not simple, more ‘easy to understand’. Each of the images below roughly corresponds with a syllable that makes up part of a name or phrase associated with the world of sport. Your job is to decipher the vaguely cryptic clues, string them together and give me the four answers I was trying to communicate. I think this week is pretty easy and I should know because I made it that way so I could begin to worm my way back into your good books.

Don’t worry if you have failing eyesight, if you click on the image, you’ll see a bigger version.

Competition

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘I am less than convinced about the bed-wetting excuse’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but please note that only your most recent guess will count. So if you happened to get four out of four first time out, then have a rethink and only get three out of four – tough noodles – that one is gonna count.

As I skipped last week, I’ve got prize budget coming out my ears. This week’s edition is for a BUMPER £/E100 Free Bet. But that’s not all. The prize will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted:

Here's a chance to win a Free more than £/€100 Bet if you're clever and lucky: pdy.pr/FLp3Ja Retweet to increase the prize ; )—
Paddy Power Blog (@paddypowerblog) December 04, 2012

Or every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the event we get more than one person with all four correct answers, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday December 11 and I’ll announce the winner soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and have reached an age were bed-wetting is entirely unacceptable.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Yeah, it was tough, but you can blame my colleague Rob for that as he got the first draft of too easily and enraged by the sight of his smug face, I made it much tougher than it had been. The answers, complete with flimsy explanation are as follows:

#1 It’s Smith And Jones. In particular, I was looking for Smith’s first name, which is Mel. The next picture is Matt ‘Handsome Devil’ Damon who is probably now best known as Jason Bourne. Picture three is somehow a politician, Boris Johnson. That was the reddest of red herrings however as I was after the name of the famous pub in the background, which is the Old Vic or the ‘Vic’ as I’m sure I can remember many a bad actor call it in a worse cockney accent. That last one is Winston Churchill and it’s a double clue. He was a Tory and he’s doing the V for Victory sign.

Stick them altogether and you get Melbourne Victory.

#2 Picture one is the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, California. You don’t really need to know that because I was using merely to highlight it’s extreme gradient, which some would call ‘steep’. The next one is a magazine cover featuring Elle ‘the slightly more wrinkly body than it was’ McPherson. That last picture is a ‘chase’.

That should have got you to Steeplechase.

#3 You needed a bizarrely good knowledge of random geordies and Jewish relgious rites. I would imagine the Venn diagram of people that applies to has a tiny cross section.

First up, that’s Donna Air – remember the Air part. That’s Richard Branson. To some he’s a Dick, but I reckon he’s really good friends call him ‘Rick’. That weird rabbi/scissors/baby combo refers to the Jewish covenant of circumcision also know as a ‘Bris’. It’s far less divine, but the last picture is a car getting a ‘tow’.

Stitch them together (and use your imagination a bit) and you should have got Eric Bristow – the darts legend currently munching on koala balls in the jungle.

#4 I know I’ll get slated for this, but here goes.

The first part is kind of a red herring. That’s Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, but specifically, the Green Monster which is a famous 11 metre high wall at the stadium. The second picture is there to communicate the concept of a ‘lab’ and that last picture of a woman in a hammock on a sunny beach is an attempt to portray the notion of ‘ease’.

I you figured out what I was doing, then you should have got Wallabies. Sorry about that.

Number four was what tripped up lots of people. We got lots of people nailing three of the four, but only two people nailed it. They are MagnusLombard and KeenBean and because they were the only two people with a full house, they’ve agreed to split the £120 Free Bet down the middle and give them a £60 Free Bet each.

Well done lads, you’re both inspirational.

There may be more competition fun soon.

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I took a week off from wrecking your heads. I wish I had a better excuse, but in reality I was denying allegations from Jeremy Paxman that this was ‘a hugely popular and thoroughly researched quiz’. Regular quiz-players will recognise that for the lie it is, but you know how rumours get around.

Anyhoo, I’m back now and so is The Competition With No Name. If you haven’t played before, don’t let the lack of a catchy title put you off.

It’s simple. Well, not simple, more ‘easy to understand’. Each of the images below roughly corresponds with a syllable that makes up part of a name or phrase associated with the world of sport. Your job is to decipher the vaguely cryptic clues, string them together and give me the four answers I was trying to communicate. I would say this week is quite tricky, but you can blame Rob for that as I ran a few clues by him and he got them too easily. Feel free to troll him on the internet.

Don’t worry if you have failing eyesight, if you click on the image, you’ll see a bigger version.

Competition

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘Let us once again dice with cryptic death’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but please note that only your most recent guess will count. So if you happened to get four out of four first time out, then have a rethink and only get three out of four – tough noodles – that one is gonna count.

As I skipped last week, I’ve got prize budget coming out my ears. This week’s edition is for a BUMPER £/E100 Free Bet. But that’s not all. The prize will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted:

Your knowledge & luck could land you a £/€100+ Free Bet for winning this quiz – pdy.pr/WaQZDY Retweet to increase the prize ; )—
Paddy Power Blog (@paddypowerblog) November 13, 2012

Or every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the event we get more than one person with all four correct answers, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday November 20 and I’ll announce the winner soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and remember Paxo from his long-haired hippy days on the BBC Breakfast News.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Last week I coined the phrase ‘reverse French tomato horn’ as part of some not very funny joke. I don’t know what a reverse French tomato horn is, but it sounds vaguely dirty. Within days, it was being searched for on Google and in the end was the joint 20th most searched for time for people coming to the blog last week. Quite the achievement for a raunchy sex act that hasn’t been invented yet.

Back to the quiz anyway and it was a tough week. I got very few correct answers. So few in fact, if we gathered all the people who sent in correct answers together, we wouldn’t even have enough to field a rugby union team. We’d probably still beat Scotland though.

The answers to last week’s competition and flimsy justification for my choosing them are as follows:

#1 That’s a dance aka a ball; then there’s the island of Timor, a place perhaps most famous for being the home of East Timor; that’s picture of late 80s and early 90s dance and drug-taking fad known as a ‘rave’; that’s two chickens, but more specifically – according to my Google images search two ‘hens’.

Stick them altogether and you should have got Baltimore Ravens.

#2 They were a set of legs (belonging to Lindsay Lohan would you believe?), but in particularly they were tights; that’s Dennis Haskins, possibly best known as Principal Belding in crap 90s kids sitcom, Saved By The Bell – he’s there to represent the notion of a headmaster, often shortened on this side on the pond to ‘Head’ [trust me, there are a lot of representations of 'head' on the internet and that's about the most viewer friendly]; the last one was tricky. Yes, it’s a dog shaped charity box, but it’s on the set of a TV show and therefore can be more generally referred to as a ‘prop’. Sorry about that, it was a tricky one.

Stick those altogether and should have got Tight Head Prop.

#3 That’s Rachel Green from Friends, but when she’s not setting women’s hairstyle trends on camera, she’s more commonly known as Jennifer Anniston and most probably ‘Jen’ to her friends; then there’s Hollywood powerhouses and family tree Michael and Kirk Douglas, which is meant to represent ‘son’; that’s a rather good picture of a bum or as the Americans like to say ‘butt’; the final picture are some buttons, switched to the ‘on’ position.

Weave them into one phrase and should have landed upon Jenson Button.

#4 We start with a few ships, also known as a ‘fleet’; that’s perennial liar and therefore future policitian, Pinocchio, who’s best known than being more wooden than Keanu Reeves – just; and we finish with a picture of a town – Tipperary, Co. Tipperary I’m told but I’ve never been.

That should have got you to League 2 up and comers, Fleetwood Town.

Well done if you got them all and bad luck if you didn’t pay enough attention at school to get a full house. The name drawn out of the rather sparsely populated hat of quiz-ending jeopardy belongs to Dermot O’Neill. He wins the Free Bet which has been inflated to €69. Oo er – reverse French tomato horn indeed.

Congratulations Dermot and bad luck everyone else. We’ll have more competition fun tomorrow.

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Whose Career Is It Anyway? has the week off. He got a little bit worked up towards the end of Super Sunday, said a few things he probably shouldn’t and I’ve taken the decision to withdraw him from the duty this weekend while my investigations into what exactly a ‘reverse French tomato horn’ is continue. That means this week the Competition With No Name returns after a long spell down at the quiz job club.

It’s simple. Well, not simple, more ‘easy to understand’. Each of the images below roughly corresponds with a syllable that makes up part of a name or phrase associated with the world of sport. Your job is to decipher the vaguely cryptic clues, string them together and give me the four answers I was trying to communicate. There are examples of what I mean around the blog, but I can’t find them at the moment.

Don’t worry if you have failing eyesight, if you click on the image, you’ll see a bigger version.

Competition

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘I know what a reverse French tomato horn is’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but please note that only your most recent guess will count. So if you happened to get four out of four first time out, then have a rethink and only get three out of four – tough noodles – that one is gonna count.

The prize starts off as a E/£50 Free Bet, but will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted or every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the event we get more than one person with all four correct answers, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday November 6 and I’ll announce the winner soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and been around long enough to remember the nightmare of having to untangle an audio cassette using only a biro and your enduring love of Sonya.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Right, that one proved to be quite a toughie. A lot of people entered, but few had the requisite misspent youth and subsequent encyclopedic knowledge of football trivia to have landed on the correct answer.

The answer was Gavin Peacock, the London born striker perhaps most famous for scoring both the winning goals as Chelsea recorded a league double over Manchester United in the 1993/94 season. He also played for Queens Park Rangers thrice, Gillingham twice along with spells at Bournemouth, Newcastle, Chelsea and Charlton in the course of his career. Nowadays, he’s supposedly studying theology with a few to becoming some sort of holy man. Good luck, Gavin, anyone who played alongside Dennis Wise is clearly on the road to a sainthood.

Not that many people had the flash of divine inspiration to come up with the correct answer, but those that did where put into my hat of quiz-ending jeopardy. That name pulled out the hat belongs to Ryan Routley and he wins a Free £76 Bet. Fittingly, Ryan is also something of a religious man, telling us via his email ‘God I hope this is correct. I got bills to pay and bets to make ‘

Well done Ryan, someone up there likes you. However everyone else down here thinks you’re a bit jammy.
There’s more competition fun on the way.

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It’s that time of the week again when I drag myself off Facebook and cobble together a competition. It’s another edition of the world’s favourite geography and football based trivia game on the Paddy Power Blog. And that’s a fact. Yes, it’s Whose Career Is It Anyway? and it pretty much hasn’t changed since I first invented about two years ago. If you’re a newbie or are a regular with a very poor short-term memory, read the simple steps outlined below and all will become clear.

• Look at the flags on the map below
• Figure out which clubs they relate to
• Find out which player played for those clubs
• Send in your answer
• Pray you’re the only correct answer or you’ll be lucky enough to be drawn out of out hat

There is a reason for picking this week’s player in relation to the weekend’s football, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a ‘topical’ reason. As usual, the flags in the map relate to EVERY CLUB this player has played for in his senior career – including loans. Best of luck.

Competition: Whose Career Is It Anyway

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘This Sunday will be of the Super variety’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but you’re clever and probably won’t need it.

The prize starts off as a €/£50 Free Bet, but will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted or every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the very likely event we get more than one correct answer, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday October 30 and I’ll announce the winner soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and been around long enough to remember Noel’s House Party.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Not for the first time. I was a little bit negligent in getting back to queries in the comments sections. And by ‘little bit’ I mean ‘totally’. Sorry about that, but I spent much of last week fighting off an unexplained illness, the source of which is a complete mystery. I was working away, I had a handful of those raw mango sweets and suddenly I was laid low for a few days. What a mystery.

Anyway, the answer to last week’s competition is Garth Crooks – former Stoke, Tottenham, Manchester United, West Brom and Charlton player and current BBC pundit responsible for selecting the Comedy Team of the Week. Granted it’s not meant to be a comedy team of the week, but it regularly makes me laugh. Particularly when he tips 25 times capped Scotland international, James Morrison for an England call-up.

The winner is regular blog competition ‘chancing his arm’-er, Gary Watson. He wins a Free £56 Bet. Sorry it’s not more Gary, but for some reason people weren’t in the mood for social media sharing this week. I blame the decline of good manners and subsequent breakdown of civil society.

The ‘honour’ of worst guess goes to Jon Baxter. He was the first person to guess at Nicolas Anelka. That’s the Nicolas Anelka who has played for clubs in France, Spain, Turkey and most recently China – all locations not contained within the confines of good old Blighty. For his terrible guess, Jon ‘wins’ the remainder of the raw mango flavoured sweets that I brought back from India although I’d recommend keeping them as a souvenir of my trip rather than actually consuming them. Bad luck, Dave Quinlan, but if this report is to be believed, your tardiness may have in fact saved your life.

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I’ve been away for a while. I spent the last couple of weeks in the New Mexico desert preparing for the the world’s highest ever skydive. I did all the maths, got all my specialised equipment and training took my balloon to about 130,000ft above sea level and just as I was about to jump, someone told me some Austrian guy did it the day before. Damn you Baumgartner! Still though, until he learns how to conceal 42 types of fruit around his body cavities I know I’ll always have at least one mention in the glorious book of world records.

Anyway, there’s been no Whose Career Is It Anyway? for the last couple of weeks. Actually, it looks like there’s been not much of anything for the last couple of weeks. It’s back and although Advertising Standards forbid me from claiming it’s ‘better than ever’, it’s certainly no worse than it was before. That’s a guarantee.

As ever, it’s easier than getting an irregular heartbeat from consuming too many cans of a well-known sports energy drink.

• Look at the flags on the map below
• Figure out which clubs they relate to
• Find out which player played for those clubs
• Send in your answer
• Pray you’re the only correct answer or you’ll be lucky enough to be drawn out of out hat

There is a reason for picking this week’s player in relation to the weekend’s football, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a ‘topical’ reason, but anyone mildly interested in football should have heard of this person. He’s not exactly obscure. As usual, the flags in the map relate to EVERY CLUB this player has played for in his senior career – including loans. Best of luck.

Competition: Whose Career Is It Anyway?

Send your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘Vodka and caffeine-laced sports energy drink, please’. Or don’t, it doesn’t really make any difference to your entry.

DON’T PUT YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION – you’ll only be helping an opponent and giving me license to take the piss out of you. You’re allowed more than one guess, but you’re clever and probably won’t need it.

The prize starts off as a €/£50 Free Bet, but will grow by one euro or pound for every time this tweet gets retweeted:

If you fancy winning a Free Bet for your football & map knowledge, you should click here >>> pdy.pr/HOnW0b RT to increase the prize!—
Aidan of Paddy Power (@PaddyPowerAidan) October 16, 2012

Or alternatively, every time this competition gets shared on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. That should boost the fund rather substantially and you might win that prize, so you should definitely do it. In the event we get more than one correct answer, the winner shall be drawn from my hat of mystery.

This week, there’s a booby prize for the worst guess. Normally ‘Robbie Keane’ is the standard worst guess, but I want more imagination than that. This prize is an opened, but still surprisingly full packet of ‘unusual’ Indian sweets I brought home from my holidays. To say they haven’t been a hit around the office is an understatement. This might explain why:

Aidan has brought these back from holiday. Has the man never heard of airport chocolate? http://t.co/1WP6F6md—
Paddy Power Blog (@paddypowerblog) October 15, 2012

Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday October 23 and I’ll announce the winners soon after. You can use the comments section for begging for clues or general observations on life, but NO ANSWERS please. If you want to contact me, you can do so using the Twitter machine where I’m @PaddyPowerAidan.

Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and remember a time when it wasn’t suspicious that Jimmy Saville hung around with all those kids.
– Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be gleefully ridiculed in public.

Paddy Power attempted to create a vortex of fortune by asking Harry to don a pair of special edition Paddy Power Lucky Pants, for charity, of course.

He, or a member of staff he’ll never have to be in the same room as, politely declined via the ancient medium of ink on mushed-up trees. But St James’s Palace did send the pants back. Unworn. That’s good news for somebody else.

This picture shows the rejected royal pants and the letter from St James’s Palace…

The Paddy Power Blog is now giving one reader the chance to win these limited edition pants which almost touched the regal rear-end of Prince Harry. This pair of pants is the exact same design as worn at Euro 2012 by Nicklas Bendtner. So, they’re slightly more spectacular than our normal-but-still-brilliant Lucky Pants.

Here’s how to enter the competition to win Prince Harry’s rejected Paddy Power Lucky Pants

• Email the Paddy Power Blog (competitions@paddypower.com) with your best party picture in tribute to Prince Harry
• Include your name, age and address in the email – and a brief explanation of the picture
• You must be over 18
• Keep the picture clean, please. Our parents read this blog
• Paddy Power will request proof that it is your picture
• The Paddy Power Blog will run the best pictures on the Blog and pick one winner. Simple
• Closing date for entries is Friday, October 26, 2012
• Paddy Power’s decision is final