🏆 Pro Kabaddi at lunch on the office TV ended with a betting pool of tea

Our office pantry in Gachibowli has a small TV that is meant for news, and during the Pro Kabaddi season it has not shown news once. It started with three people watching their lunch. By the second week there were about fifteen of us, some standing on chairs at the back. Now there is a pool. Nobody pays money, because HR would notice. The loser buys tea for the winner and for whoever sat nearest the TV. My record is four wins and six losses, and I have paid for a lot of tea. The part I did not expect is how much I now know about raiders and defenders. Two months ago I thought a super tackle was a type of wrestling hold. Our accountant, who joined only in August, explains the rules during timeouts with a diagram on a sticky note. Last Thursday the match ran past our break and the manager walked in, looked at the score, and asked who was winning. Does your office have anything like this? Ours has become the best part of the day, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a Tuesday lunch hour.

Four wins and six losses is not terrible if the tea is cheap. I once lost a whole month to a cricket pool at my old workplace and ended up paying for samosas for six people. Does your manager stay quiet about the screen time, or did he join the pool after that Thursday? A diagram on a sticky note is a better teaching method than most of the training sessions we had.

Our building's security guards do this with the evening news channel and a small radio, and the argument over the points is louder than the match itself. I like the sticky note diagram detail. Somebody always ends up being the rules person. In our case it was the electrician, who learned the whole scoring system from his nephew. Tea as the prize is a good idea because nobody can complain about the stakes.