BUMPED – ONLY 11 HOURS LEFT: So it's come to this … a seat projection thread.

Welcome to the First-and-Hopefully-Last-For-At-Least-A-Few-Months Official ITQ Seat Projection Thread!

Amaze your friends!

Aggravate your enemies!

The rules are simple:

• Predictions can be posted anytime before Monday night at 6p.m.
• If you normally use Anon as a handle, add a number or some other sort of modifier so your prescience can be celebrated, if warranted.
• If your final projection includes Independents, you must specify the name of riding/candidate
• Please try to avoid hijacking the projection thread for endless partisan back-and-forth – there are plenty of other places on macleans.ca for that
• Oh, and this is strictly for seat projections, not guesses on the share of the popular vote, or the spread – sorry, Kody.

The winner(s) will be determined by some sort of complex formula that I’ll let someone else figure out, since I’m not a math person, and the prize will be bragging rights, or something from Colleague Feschuk’s seemingly bottomless drawer of random stuff, if he feels like sharing.

With that … let the guessing game begin!

NOTE TO READERS: This was originally posted way back on Thursday night, but due to operator error, it never made it to ITQ, and wound up spending the last two days in macleans.ca limbo. Sorry about that.

UPDATE: In case y’all are curious about the press gallery’s collective wisdom, here’s a breakdown of the entries in the legendary Hot Room seat projection pool, courtesy of CanWest’s David Akin – who is a very, very brave man for posting his entry, and as such, inspired ITQ to do the same in his comment thread.  (I do, however, reserve the right to tweak those numbers ever so slightly, if necessary, when I finally post my best guess here.)

PREDICTION TIP IN UPDATE FORMAT:

A tip, for those of you still mulling over your choices: I just checked the spreadsheet for last year’s Hot Room pool, and the two most accurate prediction sites were Democratic Space and the Election Prediction Project. Democratic Space was just four seats over the final count for the Conservatives – 128 predicted versus 124 actual) but underestimated the Liberal result by nine seats – 84 predicted, 103 won.

The Election Prediction Project, on the other hand, was nearly bang on for the Liberals with a prediction of 104 seats, although that did include David Emerson’s seat. Honestly, though, who could have seen that coming? Anyway, its prediction was also six seats shy of the final Conservative number, so it might be helpful to keep all that in mind this time around.

UPDATE: And we’re closed for business … as of 9 p.m. Good luck to all! I’ll post an update on the formula for determining a winner tomorrow, and I promise it will be fairer, richer, gree- wait, cancel that. It will be fair, anyway. Happy election eve, all!