The Board appoints the OTY Awards Chairman. The OTY Awards Chairman manages to the overall program which includes four OTY categories. COTY, TOTY, SSOTY and CKOTY. All four OTY Awards are run in the same fashion and concurrently.

Typically, the 1st quarter issue of the CCTN will include an article and insert regading the OTY Awards for items issued/released in the preceeding year. The article fully describes the process and timing planned for the OTY Awards which will be handed out at the Convention in mid-year.

The CCTN insert is a Nomination Form that solicits each and every member to nominate up to five different eligible items in any or all four OTY categories. As long as you identify at least one eligible candidate in any of the four categories and return your nomination form by the deadline, you will be included in the final judging process.

From all the nomination forms submitted, the OTY Chairman reviews each to ensure that the submitter is a member in good standing with the Club and also tries to validate that each nominated item is qualified by date of issue and also by applicale criteria for the category in which it is nominated.

The Chairman creates a database that tracks the total number of times an item is nominated. After the deadline the totals are reviewed and the top ten tallies in each of the four categories then become the list of candidates (40 in all) in the voting process.

All 40 nominees are acquired by the Chairman and then scanned into a full-color digital image. A Judge's Pamphlet is created (a booklet of full-color, actual size images of both sides of all forty nominees) is created and printed; one each for every qualified Judge.

Pamphlets and ballots are then mailed out to each Judge who makes their selections and returns the ballot. Each Judge keeps the pamphlet as a souvenir of their participation.

Votes are accumulated by the Chairman, counted and a determination is made which items placed first, second and third. The first place finishing casinos are notified of their win(s) and invited to attend our Convention banquet to recieve their award.

Therefore, it is the full membership of the club that has the opportunity to determine the first place COTY winner (and also the first place TOTY, SSOTY and CKOTY winners).

Since your question spawned a bit of a thread that called into question certain aspects of the overall process, I have made a post over on the Club's BBS to address those comments further.

For those who wish to view those comments, here is the link:

http://www.ccgtcc.com/cgi-bin/mb/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=16308

Otherwise, I hope the above response answers your questions and I trust that you (and all other Club members) will be a participant in the upcoming 2003 OTY Awards.

Jim Follis
OTY Awards Chairman