Late Nights
Wow, I doubt the producers of the show was expecting the leg to go that long into the night! A couple of those tasks, especially the water pumps, seemed so designated as a "day task". Not to mention the hilariously closed up market that Nat/Kat and Gary/Mallory went to. Finding Ali Baba in a suit had never been so easy!
"Excuse me, have you seen a store that's open?"
Week 8 Results
1st place - Chad/Stephanie (2.5x)
2nd place - Jill/Thomas (1.6x)
3rd place - Nick/Vicki (1.6x)
4th place - Brook/Claire (.7x)
5th place - Nat/Kat (.5x)
6th place - Gary/Mallory (0x)
A Missed Opportunity
Chad & Stephanie's 1st place finish came to a surprise to the large majority of players this week, mostly due to those sneaky previous editors. Last week's showed Chad/Stephanie sleeping in really late and barely showed Nat/Kat at all... In fact, in the only clip we saw of them, they were smiling!
I suspect those editors are big fans of the Casino Game and just like to see how much havoc they can cause on us. 
The bonus game continued our streak of "Really Difficult Bonuses". In fact, I think we did the best on that impossible bonus game a few weeks back... At least that week, 2 people got it correct. This week, we only had one player get the bonus correct (with a Nick/Vic & Brook/Claire bet), which we will get to later.
We did lose three more players this week, samboohoo, jbenz, and IanQuentin, mostly due to the bonus game. It's really gotten to that point where you gotta go for that big payout, so there's no shame in that. Thanks for playing, all three of you.
And, everyone, be nice to samboohoo. We've both had a rough week. Although I don't really want to talk about that very much. Ask ARNutz. 
We did, somehow, gain a player this week. kduck earns the Back From the Dead award, mostly because somehow I deleted the name off the list by mistake last week. I'm really sorry about the mix-up, there. I'm glad you spoke up, as I had no idea what I had done. Very embarrassing.
Last week was relatively quiet, but this week we had a lot of movers and shakers. The Greatest Gainer Award goes Deshawnator22, who climbed 11 ranks to #22. Special mention to Starshine, who climbed a smooth 10 ranks. Nice job, you too.
The Perfect Bet Award goes to Starshine (2.55x), who was the only player to get the Lucky 7 bonus correct. In a close second place was Deshawnator22 with a nice 2.5x payout with that gutsy Chad/Steph wager.
You two really raked in the honors this week, huh? If you guys don't like the awards you won, you can always swap. Maybe one of you guys could convince kduck to trade for the one-of-a-kind Back From the Dead award. 
Leaderboard
1. Yogi - 429
2. vennui - 316
3. Jims02 - 260
4. Weez - 228
5. louislam - 210
6. ARNutz - 210
7. kidflash212 - 141
8. CTgirl - 128
9. Ontheroadagain - 95
10. Belle Book - 92
11. cahaya - 83
12. flipxycd - 70
13. Molaholic - 70
14. Starshine - 56
15. chiubakka - 47
16. Snidget - 47
17. MzTee - 42
18. bbenzenberg - 28
19. beau_30 - 19
20. sarah1234 - 17
21. Element King - 15
22. Deshawnator22 - 15
23. Nume - 14
24. kduck - 12
25. shilfiell - 10
26. popeave - 10
27. michel - 9
28. 5cats - 9
29. KwietOne - 7
30. esquire - 6
31. FFantasyFX - 1
32. samboohoo - 0
33. jbenz - 0
34. IanQuentin - 0
Yogi has continued his impressive streak in the top spot, but more and more people are challenging him... Including yours truly. The race is on now!
Week 9 Payout Table
1st place - 2x
2nd place - 1.5x
3rd place - Break even
4th place - .5x
5th place - 0x
Boring payout, I know. When you get down to 5 teams, you start running out of things you can do.
Bonus Game - Double U-Turn!
I haven't even looked at any vidcaps or anything closely, so this could possibly be the easiest bonus game ever. Or maybe it will turn out to be stupendously difficult. We shall see.
This week, players may place a bet predicting who will use the U-Turn on who. That prediction will require two parts: 1) Who uses the U-Turn, and 2) which team they use it on. Since the previews showed that next week will have a Double U-Turn, that means you may have to get two statements correct to win.
For example, a valid bonus wager may look like:
Bonus Game - 40 points
Chad/Stephanie use U-Turn on Jill/Thomas
Nick/Vicki use U-Turn on Brook/Claire
If you miss any part of your wager, you lose the whole bet. That also includes scenarios where you think only one team uses the U-Turn, but two end up doing it. If you think more than one U-Turn will be used, you better make two predictions in your wager.
U-Turn Payout Table
Correct Answer - 5x
Wrong Answer - 0x
Max Bet - 40 points
Remember, that 40 point max bet covers the entire set of your predictions.
TAR17 Teams Remaining
Brook/Claire
Chad/Stephenie
Jill/Thomas
Nat/Kat
Nick/Vicki (+0.2)
Only Nick/Vicki have fallen "below the line", so to speak, which says something about the parity of the teams this season. Good luck! 

I am going to kick myself forever for changing my Lucky 7 bet from "Chad/Steph & Gary/Mallory" to "Nat/Kat & Gary/Mallory". For once in my life my TAR Casino hunch came through, but I didn't have enough confidence in it to go for it all. Bah. I didn't want those 410 points anyway.