Royal Rumble this Sunday!

WWE presents the Royal Rumble this Sunday on Pay-Per-View. The Royal Rumble has always been my second favorite of WWE's annual Pay-Per-Views for two reasons.

1) It marks the beginning of WWE's big angle booking period, as matches are formed for Wrestlemania

2) It is the only Pay-Per-View you can gamble on or run pools around.

There are a couple ways you can do it. You could draft the 30 entrants in a Fantasy-style draft. You could draw wrestler's names. The most fun way is to draw numbers from a hat and be assigned the wrestler that gets that entry number, if you have the number coming up, the wrestler that comes out is yours and if he wins you win (this is fun to see guys anticipate their number coming up and seeing who comes out, and watching it be Hardcore Holly).

If you want to place straight-up bets. This is a good year to do it. As to this point no superstar has been placed in a long program with a champion (i.e. Batista, last year was an obvious selection as he was already beginning to feud with champion HHH). Kurt Angle, Mark Henry, John Cena, and Edge are in the two title matches on the card, every other big name on the roster is in the Rumble.

I took an opinion poll from one of the wrestling web sites to make odds:

HHH 11-9
Randy Orton 4-1
Rey Mysterio 6-1
Rob Van Dam 9-1
Shawn Michaels 24-1
Kane 99-1
Chris Benoit 49-1
Field 32-1


I personally think this would be a great year to have a mid-card wrestler in the "Field" win the whole thing. Say someone like Chavo Guerrero won the Rumble, if he had lasted a long time (say he drew #3 or some early entry), he would get a positive reaction. Then the two months before Wrestlemania could be spent with Vince McMahon doing a "holy shit my biggest pay-per-view of the year is going to be headlined by Chavo Guerrero??? over my dead body!!" angle. Chavo would have to win matches with rediculous stipulations to keep his spot and in time gain enough support to justify his new main event status. Put The Rock or Bret Hart in his corner and you have star power, charisma, and a little bit of unpredictability that could keep the WWE product, dare I say...fresh!