You may have noticed that we name certain shows best bets. Tagging shows as such in our system makes some of them show up on the "Tonight" box at the right side of each page, while they all go into the best bets page on the site and on the mobile edition (accessible on any web-enabled cellphone).

There's actually a process behind this. Every Tuesday morning, our entire staff gathers and scrolls through every show on our calendar to pick the best bets. We try to choose enough to give a range of what is going on, but be selective enough that the list helps you cut through the more than 600 shows we have listed some weeks. Most weeknights we pick 1-5; most weekend nights we try to stick to 8-10, but sometimes that's impossible. We try to err towards shows based on:

• Is the show unusual in terms of mix of artists?
• Is it an opportunity to see a lot of good bands at one time?
• Is it a band that doesn't play here often?
• Are we diverse in the genres we select?
• Are we turned on by the bands playing?
• Have we already best-betted that artist recently?
  

We don't always agree. For instance, there was some heady debate about best-betting (for us it's a verb) Dave Matthews Band/O.A.R. We have some fans in the office and some, who well, aren't. (The fans won.)

This is also the time we scrape our listings for obvious errors -- double-entered shows, venues with conflicting shows, etc. It generally takes about an hour and a half -- I've occasionally bitched that's too much time in terms of manhours when you multiply it by the dozen or so people in the room. But, it's actually a fun process and helps us all stay in touch with what's going on around town-- especially when you're like me and so busy that I (ironically) haven't been able to get to a show in months.

And, it makes us aware of gems like this that I would have otherwise missed:

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