Armchair Pools Blog

Now that the playoffs are underway and your pool has been created, the fun part begins. Watching the pool and hoping that Colorado can make you look like a genius.

So how can you and your poolies track your pool?

There are 2 ways to view a pool you have created at the Armchair Pools website.

1. Log in.
If your poolie has an account at Armchair Hockey Pools, they can login and view the Pool Standings. For those poolies obsessed with stats, there is a detailed standings page in addition to our main standings page. We also update stats throught the night and you can track your pool's progress throught the night on our Nightly Standings page.

2. View your pool's public page.
If your poolies don't have an account, don't want an account, or just can't be bothered with emails and passwords, that's ok. Just make your pool public and send out the URL to all your poolies. The pool's public standings page can be accessed by anyone. No login is required and poolies can bookmark it so it's easy to find again.

The public page can be setup by the administrator under the Pool Settings -> Basic Settings as fast as it takes to type a unique pool name and hit save.

If you have setup your pool to allow poolies the ability to change their picks, make sure you remove this ability pretty darn soon. Otherwise your poolies will be able to log in and change their picks at any time!

And if you are not an admin, but notice you can change your picks, you may want to send a friendly reminder to your admin. Unless , of course, you need to "freshen up" your roster first.

To lock your standard draft pool, go to [Pool Settings] -> [Basic Settings] and set 'Pool Lock' to 'On'

To lock your box pool, go to [Pool Settings] and set 'Pool Lock' to 'On'



If you have any questions about this, leave a question on this post, or email support@armchairpools.com.

And we're off!

We received all of our game files for the opening night of the playoffs. Looks like it will only be a 20 minute delay between when the game ends and when we can update the nightly standings. If you're not familiar with our new nightly standings screen, click the link on the Pool Standings page and check it out.

Your draft has just finished and you are now in charge of transferring your poolie's picks from a few barely legible crumpled pieces of paper into Armchair Hockey Pools.

How do you do it?

1. Enter teams
Add teams on the 'Add Teams' screen by entering your team names in the supplied text box. You can attach an email to the team, but this is optional. Adding an email allows the team to login and use the site's full functionality. However, teams that cannot login to the site can still view pool standings.

If you've used the site before, checkout the new 'Import Poolies' feature. It lets you import old poolies from previous pools with a single click.

2. Pick players
Once you've entered teams, you can assign players to the teams. Go to the 'Pick Players' screen and enter the players for each team. Note that you can also allow your users to enter their own teams initially and then you can just doublecheck them. This can be a huge time saver for the administrator.

If you have any problems, send us an email at support@armchairpools.com

Good luck in your pool!

The regular season ended with some excitement. I don't know if it's foreshadowing of things to come during the Stanley Cup run, but the leagues most exciting player was left out of headlines - and the hardware.

Sidney Crosby had a five point night and beat Alexander Ovechkin for the goal scoring title with 51 mesh ripplers to Ovi's 50. Henrik Sedin recorded a 4 point night and blew past Ovechkin to win the overall points title by 3 points. So unless he's a finalist for the Lady Bing (unlikely) he has only Lord Stanley's mug to chase

And according to everyone at my draft, he has a decent chance. 4/15 of the first rounders were Capitals, and despite his disappointing finish, Alex the Great went 1st overall.

And speaking of first overall, Redlight Rosie won our first ever Owner's Challenge and will be receiving a $100 gift certificate from shop.nhl.com. The owner's challenge was a hockey pool consisting of administrators of our regular season pools. We won't be running an owners challenge for the playoffs but look for one next regular season. We are hoping to have more sponsors and more prizes.

Good luck in your playoff pools!

Want to join a free hockey pool? The Hockey Card Show is putting on a free playoff pool. You can check it out here

Check out some old hockey cards and some 20 year old gum with the guys at thehockeycardshow.com?

If you are currently running a regular season hockey pool at our site, you may notice a new addition to the pool standings screen. There is a link in the right corner called "nightly standings".

Nightly standings is a new feature that will be operational for the 2010 playoffs. It is updated about 30 mins after each game is completed and shows the performance of each team and player in the pool. It also displays the current pool standings and updates them throughout the night.

Sorry for the teaser. I wish we could flip the switch and make it operational now. However, for various reasons, we need to wait until the playoffs.

Some more draft strategy tips from Dobber over at Puck Daddy. Some good stuff. If you're in a pool with people reading his page, prepare for a rush on Buffalo players ....

The Buffalo Sabres have been solid when it comes to defense this season, but as the season winds down they seem to have found the other element of the game of hockey – offense. With Ryan Miller’s MVP-type season obviously the main – check that, “only” – reason that the Sabres rule their division, there have been some concerns over their firepower. Another eight games of this new offense and all fears should be washed away.

In the last six games, Buffalo has scored six or more goals twice, something that they haven’t done prior to that since January 18 and only four times previously all season. In fact, they have 25 goals in those six games, understandably coming away with 11 of a possible 12 points. This will open up some eyes, for those of you who will be in playoff pools. If it doesn’t, it should.

The Sabres will probably play either Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia or Atlanta (unless the Rangers can pull off a Hail Mary and get back into the mix). You can’t say with authority that Miller alone could not single-handedly take down any of those squads. And now that the team is finding the net on a regular basis, they should make for some appealing dark horses. Don’t be fooled by their end of season statistics.