On Friday's, 102.1 the Edge has 'Psychic Nikki' on the Dean Blundell show.  She makes predictions about future events and takes calls from listeners.  She also talks a lot about celebrities, including predicting those celebrities that will have health problems or will die.

So, not wanting to miss a research opportunity for the death pool, I checked out her website.  For the past few years she has been listing celebrities that she 'sees' as dying soon.  I figured this was liquid gold for me!  I could use the powers of a clairvoyant to help me win the death pool!  She has predicted correctly many celebrity passings including: Anna Nicole Smith, Merv Griffin, Luciano Pavarotti, Tammy Faye Baker, and Joey Bishop.

Then I started to look a little closer.  Each year she has quite a long list of potential celebrities that will meet their maker.  In this list, I noticed a lot of the same names that we have had on our death pool rosters.  For example, in 2007, 16 of her 40 celebrities were included in our death pool at some time.  In 2008, 17 of 35 were picks that we had chosen.  So really, 'psychic' Nikki is merely running her own death pool and each year selecting 40 odd celebs that are close to kicking the bucket and then celebrating in her 'psychicness' when she gets a hit.

Not only that, but of course her personal death pool is a keeper pool, since she would call herself correct if she predicted the person would die 4 years ago.

So how does her death prediction accuracy stand up??  Well psychic Frumpy was 3/10 (30%) in our first year of the death pool.  'Psychic' Nikki's best year was 5/40 (12.5%).  Frumpy kicked her ass.

Frumpy's great year aside, even getting 1 death out of 10 gives us a 10% which is close to Nikki's 12.5%.  So, we all can claim that we are clairvoyants, just like (not a) psychic Nikki.  (Ooops, all of us except Ottawa)