Armchair Pools Blog

The Armchair Pools Owners Challenge is in full swing. The Owners Challenge is a hockey pool we run each year. It's free to join, but to get your invitation, you need to be the administrator of a paid pool at Armchair Pools. And you need to have paid by Oct 1st. We do it to try and get people to sign up for their pools early - you should do it because the grand prize is $100 at shop.nhl.com.

The current pool standings are below:

458 pts - Red Light Rosie
450 pts - Team Duca
412 pts - Coastal 007

297 pts - Armchair Pools

Duca started December almost 30 points out of first but has rallied this month to pull within 8 points of Red Light Rosie. At this rate, we may have a new leader by Christmas. Team Coastal is struggling in third but is having a better December than both of the top two teams. If he keeps it up, he may be in striking distance by the new year.

The team from Armchair Pools is in last place. I know what you're thinking - how can he go in his own pool? It wouldn't be fair if he won. You're right, and to make things even more slanted in my favour, I have picked a team consisting entirely of Vancouver Canucks. So while I am not doing so well now, I have been assured by Kyle Wellwood that they will pick things up in the second half and I am a shoe in for the grand prize.

Good luck to all the administrators!

Reports are here and are working now. Sorry for issues you may have had over the last few days. Check out the Reports tab from inside your pool. We have built an "unpicked player" or "free agent" report so far. A picked player report that details what team players are on is next. If you have other reporting requirements, let us know and we will make sure we get something built that meets your needs.

Armchair Pools has recently implemented a private trash talk feature. It allows you to chat and send private messages to specific people in your pool without everyone else seeing what you are saying. You are also notified when someone is initiating a private conversation with you. The feature is great for private discussions about trades, deals, or your contempt for that Gord fellow who won the pool last year and now is in first ...

You can check it out on the normal trash talk screen. Depending on your browser, you may have to clear your cache before the feature will work properly for you. If you have any issues with it, please send us an email at support@armchairpools.com

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?

The first thing you need to do is make sure there are other people in your pool. This is done by adding them through the Armchair Pools evite features found under the 'Manage Poolies' section. Every poolie must have an email, so that they can access the pool, do 'forgot passwords', and all that good stuff. As soon as you do the invitation your poolies are added to your pool and you can enter their players.

Editors note:

We have very recently changed the invitation process so that you don't have to wait for poolies to 'accept'. Please let us know immediately if you have any issues with the process, support@armchairpools.com.

Thanks!

One of the most commonly asked questions about the Armchair Pools application is regarding people's team name on the pool standing's page. It initially displays as the person's email. While this is accurate, it makes the standings hard to read. I mean who else, other than me, knows that my brother in law is sweetcheeks@shaw.ca?

Don't worry - your team name can be changed. Simply click on the little pencil icon next to your name. A text box will appear and you can pick whatever name you want. Easy.

But stop - don't go away - there's more.

If you update your name in your profile, then your name will be used as your team name on any future pools you participate in at Armchair Pools. To access your profile click on the 'my Profile' icon on the top right of the screen.

So what is Armchair Pools?

Armchair Pools is an online hockey pool manager. We are similar to a lot of the hockey pool sites out there - but with a few twists.

We provide all the features you would expect from a standard hockey pool manager. You can create pools, add teams, pick players, set complex scoring rules from a myriad of NHL statistics and of course watch your pool standings throughout the season while trash talking with your friends.

So how is Armchair Pools different than other hockey pool sites?

Armchair Hockey Pools will officially launch Sept 1, 2009.

However, I like what we have done to this point so I snuck the site up prematurely when my developers weren't looking. They were not very happy – something about final tests not done, minor changes needed, not standard release procedure, bla, bla, bla.

Whatever. procedure schmomedure. I think the red chair icon is pretty slick and that’s good enough for me.

Also, I thought it would be neat to let everyone in and have a look at what is coming in September. Kind of like a hockey pool open house. So if you are curious, feel free to create a pool and poke around in the site. Some things may change over the next month or so as we do some last minute tweaks. However, what is there now will give you a good idea about how the site works.

The Facebook component of our site is not accessible right now, but I will make it available up as soon as we are allowed. It's pretty cool, you can track your pool right from your Facebook profile. And hey brother-in-law, you have 1 new notification .... "I am still beating you in the hockey pool ... plllthplth".

Check back with the Armchair Blog regularly as future posts will have more details about the site. If you have any questions about Armchair Hockey Pools, post them and I will be happy to answer.