Sharksworld and JustRugby.net are pleased to announce that the 2014 Super Rugby Last Man Standing competition is now open for entry and will be kindly sponsored by CAT® Apparel and BLK Sports.

Last Man Standing is a game that is deceptively simple in concept – yet painfully difficult when it comes to execution. Simply put, there are 15 teams taking part in Super Rugby and all you have to do is correctly predict just one game that each of those 15 teams will win. For every week of Super Rugby, you pick a team which you believe will win their corresponding fixture that week. If the team does win, you stay alive and progress to the next round, with all the teams you have picked previously no longer eligible for selection. In other words, as you progress through the rounds of the game, the list of teams form which you can pick diminishes as the challenge becomes harder and harder.

If the team you pick does not win, though (and a draw unfortunately counts as a loss) then you die. In this way, we whittle down the field until, at some point in the competition, we only have one player left – a Last Man Standing who will win the prize.

The reality, though, is slightly different. We give you a few things to help you on your way, in the form of lifelines and default picks. Last Man Standing is a devilishly hard competition and in the past, we’ve seen 80% of contestants eliminated by the second week, with just one big upset accounting for far too many young lives. In this year’s competition, you’ll have two lifelines each, meaning that your first two deaths don’t count. Bear in mind, though, that if there’s a deadlock at the end, we’ll obviously give the prize to the contestant with the highest number of remaining lifelines. If you forget to make a pick, we’ll assign a default selection for you, but that process will cost you a lifeline. There’s also no guarantee that the default pick will win, though, so it’s quite possible to lose two lifelines in a single round in this way.

We have also introduced four bye picks, to make up for the fact that Super Rugby 2014 will be played over 19 rounds (although rounds 1 and 17 are “split rounds” in which not all teams are playing). You can opt to use a bye in any round and will automatically progress to the next round of the competition unscathed.

Full detail regarding the format and rules of the game can be found here.

Our fantastic sponsors, CAT® Apparel and BLK Sports, have put up some great prizes for this year’s competition. We have CAT® Apparel vouchers, as well as the new BLK Sharks Super Rugby jersey up for grabs for those who do best in the competition.

In order to play Last Man Standing, you’ll need to head on over to JustRugby.net and sign up. If you already have a Sharksworld account, you can import and log in with those details, alternatively, you can log in there with your FaceBook, Twitter, Google or LinkedIn account, or register a new username on JustRugby.net. Click on the logo below to get started and best of luck for a tough competition ahead.