Armchair Pools Blog

This is the seventh and final installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

So your pool is almost over and you are currently out of the prize money. You go through the motions each night. You check your scores, do some optimistic math, but deep down you know that a 60 point gap can not be closed in 3 weeks.

Your team may be done, but don't let your sour attitude bring down the pool. Poolies return to pools that are fun, so if you want your friends to sign up again next year, buck up and finish your pool in style.

Here is a checklist that will keep all of your poolies happy right to the end.

This is the sixth installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

Once your draft is over and the players are correctly entered into your pool manager, most of your work is done. You can take a well deserved break and watch the standings for a bit. During the first month or so, the season creates it's own excitment. Poolies jockey for position while the NHL teams establish who is good and who is stinking up the rink. At this stage, every poolie has a chance to win.

After a few months however, the pool standings stabilize and my brother-in-law along with a few others usually start to lag behind the pack. Competition for winning the pool is limited to a select few poolies. Those on the wrong end of the standings can begin to lose interest.

However, a good administrator will keep things interesting for even the losing poolie. Here's how.

This is the fifth installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

The draft is over. Your buddies have either left your house or have left you at the pub with a disproportionate share of the bill. It's kind of like post Christmas morning when you were a kid. All of the anticipation is gone, there are no more surprises - just cruel reality. You didn't get Sidney Crosby in the first round, you picked Tim Connelly as your breakout player again and all you got in the late rounds were a few pairs of underwear and slippers.

As a pool administrator, you are now faced with the daunting task of entering all of your pools picks. If you entered your picks online as the draft happened - you're laughing. You are done and might as well skip this section. However, if you are like the rest of us, you've got papers filled with 300+ names that need to be entered into an online hockey pool manager.

The key to this task is picking a hockey pool site with a highly functional player entry screen. Do this right and this task will be fairly effortless, pick a poor site and you will suffer for hours. To help you make a decision, here are some of the things you should look for when evaluating a pool site for ease of data entry

Player Detection
A feature on player entry screens that you should consider mandatory is the player detection feature. As you begin to enter a player's name, a dropdown list with player names appears and is automatically adjusted as you type. Each extra letter typed limits the list of players you can choose from. Usually, within 3 or 4 keystrokes, the player you want has been isolated and selection is a simple enter key. The screens below show how the Armchair Hockey Pools player detection feature would help you select Roberto Luongo.



Using the Armchair Hockey Pools player detection feature, I have been able to enter a team of 25 players in just under 2 minutes. This means my pool with 15 teams will take me about 30 minutess to get online and running. I love this feature.

Poolie Data entry
What's faster than a pool site that lets you 15 teams in half an hour? A site that lets poolies enter their own teams so that you only spend a few minutes entering your own. Armchair Hockey Pools has a feature that allows you to give your poolies temporary access to their teams. They can enter their players and player roles and when they are all done you can lock everything down so they can't make changes while the season is running. All you need to do is a simple review to make sure Sidney Crosby hasn't been chosen three times by your brother-in-law. Besides saving time, this feature allows the poolies themselves to control when the pool gets going. No more whining to you because the team's aren't entered.

Reorder Players
Another feature that I also think is mandatory - and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why more pool sites don't have it - is the ability to reorder players within a team. Undoubtedly, you will have at least one instance where you miss a player as you are entering a team. With some pool sites, you have to delete the players that are now out of order and reenter them all correctly to maintain the correct draft order. If the missing player is near the top of the draft and you don't find him until the bottom of the draft, this means re-entering the entire team. It is a complete waste of time. Armchair Hockey Pools allows you to drag and drop players between different draft positions so if you make a mistake with the player order, it can be fixed quickly


Tune in next time for Part 6 of our series, "Running the season". It will give you some ideas of things to do throughout the season to keep the pool fun.

This is the fourth installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

You've done the research, you know the players you want, and your list of sleeper picks looks promising. Last year you made some bad picks late, but this year is the year that you will pick the ultimate team.

Draft day is filled with so much hope and promise. Hope and promise that is predictably dashed by Christmas as your sleeper pick gets sent to the minors and a groin injury sidelines your star player. Not that I'm bitter about last year or anything.

Regardless, draft day is my favorite day of the hockey pool - and I am not alone. Most poolies look forward to draft day the entire summer. So if you are organizing your hockey pool, you're under a lot of pressure to make sure the day runs smoothly.

Here are some tips to help you out.

This is the third installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

The first time I organized a hockey pool draft, it was for 15 people. I sent out 40 or so emails to all my friends and told everyone it was first come, first serve and then sat back and got ready to record the names. 5 people replied. 3 people wanted in the pool. I was astounded. Out of all my hockey loving friends, my Canadian hockey loving friends, only three people wanted to go in the pool?

I eventually got 14 people for my pool, but it took right up until the day of the draft and it took a lot more work that I had anticipated. I've since improved my recruitment process but I am still amazed at the amount of effort it takes to find 15 people to get together for an afternoon of drafting.

When the Armchair Pools hockey pool manager was developed, we incorporated functionality that would help pool administrators with the invitation/recruitment process. The "poolie management tool", as it is called, helps send and manage invitations to your pool. You can track who has entered your pool, who has declined and you can send reminders to those people who haven't replied. It can even track who has paid their entry fee. I have used the tool this season to organize my pool and it has helped me immensely. You can test it out for free by creating a trial pool here.

Regardless of the tool, I still follow a set of rules when recruiting people for my pool. They are listed below.

This is the second installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

So you've decided on your hockey pool format and you're ready to get things going. Unless you have decided to do a box style pool, you are going to have to organize a draft. While there are many things you need to do to execute a successful draft, right now there are only two things you need to worry about. Where is the draft going to take place? and when is the draft going to take place?.

This article is the first installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to organize a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

Before you can begin to organize your hockey pool, you need to decide what type of pool you are going to run. Picking the format of your hockey pool can be a daunting task. There are so many different pool styles with different permutations that considering them all can be mind boggling. This article does not go into all the different pool formats in great depth. However, it gives a broad overview of the most popular types of pools that are out there and will help you get an idea of what pool style is best for you.

September is here and we all know what that means. It's time to stop making "Top Ten" lists, discussing the KHL and starting rumors about where Ilya Kovulchuk will play.

That's right. The NHL regular season is fast approaching and it's time to start organizing your hockey pool. Whether you're a veteran pool administrator, or organizing your very first NHL hockey pool, it's a significant amount of work. To help ease the burden and help make your pool a success, Armchair Hockey Pools will be running a seven part series on how to organize your hockey pool.

Seven parts?.

Hey, we take our hockey pools seriously.

We will be discussing everything from what style of pool to pick to what type of beverages should be served on draft day. We'll do a feature a day for the next seven days and the schedule is laid out below. As we publish each part, I will provide a link from this article, so you can always refer back to this page to get the full series.

If you're stinking up your pool this year and are already thinking about the 2010/2011 season, check out Dobberhockey's list of of future prospects

The Dobber has the inside scoop on Matt Moulson - the Islanders leading scorer?