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By Keith Blincoe, Staff Writer

Warning: Satire from now until the end of the article. Seriously.

Hostilities in the FORAD smoldering conflict have at last come to an end. The final result was a huge surprise for everyone, with the aptly named Team 6 coming in sixth, though they had been in first place until the final round. Experts say the cause of the upset was oil prices, which spiked in the penultimate round and plummeted in the final one. The obscenely named Da Bokis correctly predicted both changes and made a killing.

Team Six’s Jorge Cespedes Flores attributed his team’s loss to Takahiro Ito. “I don’t like to blame people, I really don’t. My friends know I’m not the kind of person who blames others, and Taka is my dearest friend, he really is, he knows that. But the way that he shouted at us for the smallest mistakes, the way he would just—you know, one time Brendon [Biegel] was recommending something about call options, while swinging these enlarged, um, what do you call them, poi balls or something, I guess, you know those brightly colored plastic balls on strings that he swings around, and it’s a very, I think, cool thing that he does, but anyway, I guess and Taka jumped up on the desk, grabbed Brendon’s balls and flung them across the room. No one was allowed to say the word ‘call’ again, which made it very difficult to communicate. It’s hard to avoid confusion when you have to say things like ‘I will put you tonight’ just because you want to get in touch with someone. But I don’t blame Taka. It’s not his fault.” (Note: the above has been edited substantially for brevity.)

There were reports of psychological warfare too. Wayne Huang said, “One time at the pub Luca [Lin] and I were talking about FORAD and I may have let slip some slight falsehoods about how the tender market works [referring to FORAD’s auction market]. It wasn’t a big lie, more of a joke, really. I doubt he even believed me.” When pressed, Wayne said, “I don’t remember exactly what I told him. I think I just told him there was an app that helped potential customers and sellers meet and get to know each other, and that he might want to practice using the app. That’s it. No big deal.”

While people from other teams did not share the spotlight of the extreme finishers, the simulation was a roller coaster ride for them too. Luca was disappointed in his team’s performance. “We tried everything we could. We even participated in the Tinder market. My participation was probably the most vigorous of anyone’s. But just when I thought the markets would swipe right, they swiped left. Now I’m sad.”

Observers remarked that while teams were focused on winning, it wasn’t actually a game. It’s more of a simulation—a simulation of real-life decision making, in which pure speculation would be frowned upon. Da Bokis takes this concern very seriously, promised Kush Udeshi, as he gazed into the bottom of his champagne flute. “There’s nothing that weighs so heavily on our minds, believe me.” His teammate Jose Manuel Balmori would have agreed, but he was too busy dancing on his barstool, and Anmol Juneja would have agreed too if he had not been too busy dancing on Jose’s shoulders. “See, we’re just not very risk averse,” concluded Kush.

Note: All the names have been changed to other people’s names in order to protect people’s privacy.