Making Sense of Food Club

It’s a little place in Krawk Island, right below the Bilge Dice shack, where you can bet on pirates eating. Pirates have hearty appetites, you know!

Each day, you’re able to place up to ten bets on these pirates, using the Place A Bet link at the top of the main Food Club screen. When you visit the betting page, you’ll be greeted by the blue Kacheek proprietor, and below him will be... a mass of confusion, probably.

But don’t worry! You don’t have to randomly click and select pirates without knowing what you’re doing. You can make educated guesses on who to bet on, and this guide will (hopefully) give you some tips as to how. But first, a general summary of each of the links you see at Food Club:

Pirates: This is a list of all the pirates that compete daily. Also included in the handy chart are the pirates’ heights, weights, and their win/loss ratios. Clicking on a pirate’s name will take you to his profile, where you can see his picture, the food types he likes, and the ones he’s allergic to as well as the info posted on the main Pirates page.

Courses: This is a list of the foods the pirates have to eat... every day. I imagine it must get tiring to eat the same forty foods during a lifetime, but I digress. The names of the foods are links, and if you click on one of them, it takes you to a page that has a picture of the food in question, as well as the food categories it falls under.

Place A Bet: Where you place your bets.

Current Bets: Your bets for the current match will be located here. After the day’s match is over, these go poof.

Collect Winnings: If you bet on a match, and if your bet/s came through, you can collect your winnings here.

Bet History: Just a little chart totalling how many bets you’ve placed, how much you’ve spent putting those bets in, your win total, and the difference between the two.

Next Round: You can view the pirates competing in each arena and which foods they have to eat here. The five arenas are located at the top of the table; the Shipwreck, Lagoon, Treasure Island, Hidden Cove, and Harpoon Harry’s.

Previous Round: The pirates that won in each arena for the previous match.

Leave: Go back to Krawk Island. But you don’t really want to do that, now do you?

So now that that little overview is taken care of, let’s move on to betting.

The best way to make educated bets is to make a few charts to save yourself some time in the future (the alternative would be looking up the pirates and foods individually, which can take up a lot of time and cause bouts of frustration). You can do these on paper or on the computer. First, make a list of all the pirates and the food types they enjoy and the food types they’re allergic to. Then make a list of all the foods and the categories they fall under. I’ll use Scurvy Dan the Blade and the Lemon Blitz as examples:

Scurvy Dan the Blade: Likes Salty Foods and Meats; Allergic to Candy.

Lemon Blitz: Fruits, Dairy, Smoothies

You can organize your charts however you’d like, just so long as the information is there.

Once that’s finished, wander on over the Next Round page. Get out a new piece of paper and write out each of the five arenas and the pirates competing in each.

Let’s say Scurvy Dan the Blade, Gooblah the Grarrl, Squire Venable, and The Tailhook Kid are competing in the Lagoon.

They have to eat a Rainbow Negg, Blueberry Tomato Blend, Fresh Seaweed Pie, Super Lemon Grape Slush (I don’t see how anyone could possibly enjoy that), and Sushi. There will always really be ten foods the pirates have to eat, but to keep this article from being excessively long and complicated (both for me and you), I’ll just use five in my example.

Get out your charts. You see that Scurvy Dan likes Salty Foods and Meats, so look for any foods that fall among those categories. In the example, Fresh Seaweed Pie is a Salty Food and Sushi is a Salty Food and Meat, so Dan has three advantages. There are no Candy items, so he doesn’t have to eat anything he’s allergic to; happy day! :D His tally would be 3-0, so mark that on your piece of paper next to his name.

Gooblah the Grarrl likes Meats and is allergic to Slushies. There is one Meat item, and one Slushie, so his tally is 1-1.

Squire Venable likes Breads and is allergic to Fruits. There are no Bread items, and one Fruit item. His tally is 0-1.

The Tailhook Kid likes Vegetables (good for him!) and is allergic to Neggs. There are no Vegetables, but there’s one Negg. His tally is also 0-1.

So we see that Scurvy Dan has the lead with 3-0, and he’s followed by Gooblah with 1-1. Chances are, one of them will win the arena, though Squire Venable and The Tailhook Kid have slight chances to pull an upset.

Gooblah is generally a stronger pirate than Dan, so even with an allergy to face, he could still win. To find out if a pirate is stronger or weaker, check his win percentage on the Pirates page. Gooblah has won 65% of his matches, the most of anyone else competing.

So let’s say you’ve decided to bet on Scurvy Dan and Gooblah in this arena. You can’t bet on both in the same bet, but you can split your bets for them! Go through the other arenas, too, and make decisions concerning them. You don’t have to pick a pirate for every arena – sometimes it’s just too close to call, and with your limited bets, you can’t cover everyone.

Now head on over to the Place A Bet page. Open one of the dropdown menus; you should see a ratio in parentheses next to the pirates’ names. A pirate with a lower ratio, like 2:1, probably has a better chance of winning over a pirate with 13:1 odds. Keep in mind, however, that we, the betting public, are responsible for changing the odds. More people betting on a pirate will cause his ratio to decrease and vice versa, but that can be a good thing – it gives you a good indication of who people think are likely to win, which can help in your betting.

Don’t be discouraged if you want to bet on a 13:1, though. Those do win. :)

So anyway, continuing our example, tick off the Lagoon and select Scurvy Dan the Blade from the dropdown menu. Now to decide how much to bet on him!

Below the blue Kacheek you’ll see something along the lines of “You can only place up to 2682 NeoPoints per bet, which is 50 + 2 for every day you have been playing Neopets (1316 days). Be sure to read through the rules before placing your bets!” That’s right, the younger your account, the smaller your profits will be, and vice versa. Many older Neopians can greatly benefit from Food Club. I’m in the middle, I suppose, so I make a decent amount from Food Club.

Anyway, you generally want to bet the maximum amount you can. In my case, that would be 2682, so in the Winnings Calculator I’d enter 2682 in the Bet Amount block.

The calculator will determine how many Neopoints you will win with the bet amount and odds entered if your bet pulls through.

A side note about betting on multiple pirates in the same bet: Your ENTIRE bet must come through! If you place a single bet on three pirates, all three of them have to win! Just having one or two of them win will cause that particular bet to fail.

Click the “Place this bet!” button once you’ve picked your pirate/s and entered your bet amount. It will take you to the Current Bets page.

Since we wanted to bet on Gooblah as well, click the back button on your browser, and simply change Scurvy Dan in the dropdown menu to Gooblah and click the button again, as your bet amount should have stayed in the block.

You’re allowed up to ten bets per day, so we have eight left if we wanted to place bets on other pirates. For the purposes of the example, though, we’ll just leave it at those two.

Other people post their Food Club bets on pet lookups and petpages, and there are boards dedicated to the Food Club. One is found at the games board, and the other is located at Charter, a premium-members-only board. They both post links to bets you can use. I’d suggest using these the first few days at least, to get the hang of it and also to get some idea of how you might like to format your bets if you make them yourself.

The pirates start eating at 1:45 PM NST every day, and are finished at 2:15 PM NST. They don’t take their time eating, evidently.

At 2:15 you can visit the Current Bets page to see if you cashed in and visit the Next Round page to view the next matchups.

So that’s it! A quick overview of Food Club and a very, very short guide on how to make decently educated bets. I hope you picked up some tips and maybe have a new daily.

Happy betting!

P.S. – Can I have your autograph, Scurvy Dan? :3