A video of last week's Burger Bowl in Brooklyn promoted by the League of Amateur Eaters can be viewed on youtube.

February 12, 2011 at 11:53 am by ojrifkin · More posts about:New York City, Videos | Permalink * Comments (7)

7 Comments »

  1. Mick from Queens said

    February 12, 2011 @ 1:29 pm

    Link will not open

  2. ojrifkin said (Registered July 27, 2005)

    February 12, 2011 @ 3:29 pm

    That’s been fixed. Thanks.

  3. stephanie_wu said (Registered August 17, 2010)

    February 12, 2011 @ 3:54 pm

    Strange, they call themselves the “League of Amateur Eaters”, yet many amateur eaters do not qualify for the league!! For the Burger Bowl, any amateur who won money in the last 10 years was disqualified, which is just about all of the amateur competitive eaters I know. Sure there are amateurs who could be in MLE, but there are many more like me who aren’t that good, but who win an occasional local contest here and there. To make matters worse, there are amateurs who have not won money who are great eaters and who would have been allowed in the Burger Bowl, and amateurs who have won money who are not that good who wouldn’t have been allowed in (e.g., myself).

    I propose that competitive eating have a rating or handicapping system, similar to what chess has (Elo rating system where ratings go from 100 to over 2800–see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system), or what pool (pocket billiards) has (rating system with grades from D- to A++ or even A+++). This way leagues like LACE could simply just specify they want eaters only with rating of below such and such a figure. Why is there no governing body for competitive eating that is willing to help implement such a system????

  4. stephanie_wu said (Registered August 17, 2010)

    February 12, 2011 @ 3:55 pm

    Correct link from my post above is:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

  5. Lack of Rating System said

    February 12, 2011 @ 7:24 pm

    It would be impossible to have a global rating system of ALL eaters at this time, because groups of eaters (MLE, AICE, LACE, Indies) do not compete against each other. For a system to work, there would have to be intermingling of the eating orgs, so that the gaps in the head to head competitions could be filled with how a certain eater ate against another eater that they have in common with another eater.

    For example, using MLE eaters – Sean Brockert (and this is not slam against Sean, just an example) has never competed against Joey Chestnut; however, he has competed against people who have competed agains Joey, such as Bertoletti, Shoudt, Sonya, Erik Denmark, etc. A theoretical number could be calculated based on how he did against the in-common eaters as to how he would fare against Joey.

    The more overlaps there are, the better the numbers would be.

    As I noted, until there could be more overlaps amongst the organizations, this won’t work.

  6. BigWillTheChamp said (Registered February 1, 2009)

    February 13, 2011 @ 7:50 am

    After meeting the guy running it and seeing the contest Stephanie, you’re thinking more seriously than they are.
    They’re literally looking for the “average joe”. Guys who see it on tv and say “I could do that”. Someone like you, who has done it, would smash them. It wouldn’t have been fair to bring in these 4 average joe types and have someone like you kill them because it would take the whole point away.

  7. Cutter said (Registered November 9, 2010)

    February 14, 2011 @ 12:53 am

    It looks like a pretty good performance at least for the winner of these “average joe’s”. Since high school athletes don’t play against NFL athletes, rather they are compared to other teams on their own level, why should eating be any different? The winner could hold his own on other levels in my humble opinion. There is nothing wrong with 13 sliders in 5 mins.

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