...discredits your opinion as a whole.

I agree that this listing discredit's the site as a whole.

Guys this is Paolo from The Deli NYC. I slowly perfected this polling system over the past 4 years, and - although it may not be perfect - it seems to work better than many bogus polls that are entirely based on readers' votes or on "VIP" guests who are obviously not going to listen to 200 nominated bands unknown to most. The jury we involved (list coming soon) is made of local venue promoters, music bloggers, record store staff and in general chicagoans who "breathe" local music throughout the year. These people see a lot of shows, listen to a lot of bands, and know the scene and what it takes to be a good band in such a competitive field. Their vote has a lot more weight than the readers' vote and even our own writers vote. This being said, there are 2 factors that need to be considered: 1. Some of the jurors we ask to vote forget to send their vote in - this of course has also an influence on the results - 2. There are so many good bands that often the jurors' vote is very fragmented, like it happened this year in Chicago, where the readers' vote became crucial in designating the winner. So the bottom line I guess is that 1. This is really the best we can do in terms of "polling system" - unless critics feel like suggesting a different one. 2. As always, we can't make everybody happy: in the cities where the overall poll was won by a band that didn't have many readers' votes we received opposite complaints from the ones we got here in Chicago. So, dudes, I would recommend you take this simply as a playful way to give exposure to emerging deserving local bands - which by the way is something I don't see many other publications doing.

I agree. Most of this is garbage. Do like Hey Champ though.

These results are laughable both the rankings and the exclusions and in my mind discredit the site overall.