The first match is almost never about who wins. We always know the answer. It's about vote totals and setting a trend more than anything else, and though Mario's expected drubbing of Joanna Dark didn't pass 100,000 votes, it was still a fairly decent increase from the vote totals we had seen since CNET's wonderful idea to redesign the site. This was likely due to the Gamespot advertisement (which caused a major stir, especially since the banner was still there on Gamespot's homepage after the contest started; people thought that Gamespot's casual bias would "ruin" our contest), but more voters is never a bad thing.