On Wednesday morning, Billboard's Chart Alert column was running a story claiming that, in the closest race for number one since SoundScan began tracking data in 1991, "The Game's LAX beats Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone by a mere handful of units." It went on to say that the former sold 238,285 copies, the latter 238,272. The margin: a mere 13 copies, or 0.005%.

Twelve hours later, the story had been re-written, with Slipknot's album now adjudged the bigger seller, ...