Press Esc

Fidel Castro is the person who is most likely to die this year, according to players taking part in the Celebrity Death Pool, Internet’s most morbid gambling competition.

The ailing strongman of Cuba has topped the list in a number of Celebrity Death Pools on the internet, where players try to predict the list of celebrities who die in the following year.

Some Celebrity Death Pool games are played for cash [Press Esc does not provide links to gambling sites], but in hundreds of discussion boards across the internet, users take part in the competition for free [ Chortle].

Fidel Castro, who came to power in 1959 in communist revolution, handed the responsibility of day to day running of the country to his brother Raúl last year on medical grounds.

In October the Cuban President personally refuted stories reporting a supposed worsening of his state of health and has affirmed that he is progressing as anticipated after his operation[ Granma].

The other top ten celebrities in the Death Pool are Televangelist Billy Graham, actor Kirk Douglas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"It would be nice to think that it is something odd and unique, because when you go back to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross with her book on death and dying, she cast the U.S. as a death-rejecting society not wanting to deal with our emotions,” Robert Marrone, author of the recent book Death, Mourning and Caring told the media about Celebrity Death Pool concept, that dates back to 1986. “But in the 25 years since the book, views have changed to thinking the U.S. has an approach/avoidance conflict with death. There's a tremendous fascination with death and loss but always in a frivolous way. The Web versions of this frivolous, fascinating side of death is always kind of detached, always anonymous. It's more of a reflection of people's fascination and fear of it at the same time."

“As a wagering point, death meets all of the standard criteria,” Prof. Fredrick Koenig at Tulane University in New Orleans said. “It's a natural occurrence, of public interest and verifiable. You have the strategists--those who keep tabs on celebrities' liver conditions and all those Lifetime Achievement Awards when forecasting cadavers. These people, he said, tend to see fate as something open to analysis and control. They are people who typically have some power in life.”