Armchair Pools Blog

The Games are over. The tournament is over. And our Olympic Pools are over. Thanks to everyone who took part and helped make it a success. We appreciate the support and all of the feedback.

We had a lot of complaints about our "create team" process and we are currently in the process of fixing the issue. Come playoff time you will no longer be required to enter an email address to create a team in your pool. So come back in April and check it out.

Thanks to dobberhockey.com for running and promoting the Dobber Olympic Pool. There were over 2300 participants and in the end "thenuts" took first prize and walked off with a signed Steve Yzerman Team Canada jersey. Very cool. Congratulations also to "Ezzieking" who won 4th place and will receive free hockey pools at Armchair Pools until the 2014 games in Sochi. That's 4 years of free pools!

If you ran a box pool, check out this file. It lists all the boxes with points for all players so you can check out where you went wrong.

But don't worry if your pool performance was not that good. According to Ron Wilson, you can have the best team, but still not win the gold. Of course he is refering to the growing controversy surrounding the overtime scoring in the gold medal game. Wilson is upset that Team USA's score for artistic impression was completely ignored when totaling the game's final score. For some reason, the judges only considered Crosby's overtime goal and Team Canada walked away with the gold medal.

Anyway, it's now back to the grind. So good luck in the stretch drive of your regular season pools and we look forward to seeing you for the playoffs.

Lots of people have been asking so here's the answer.

When two teams are tied, our standings show them in places 1,2. However, there is no reason why one is #1 and the other is #2. They are truly tied and should probably be listed as 1,1. This is something we will be looking at for a future enhancement.

We have no official tiebreaker built into the pool. It is up to the pool administrator to decide on any tiebreaking rules. I have seen some pools use goals, followed by game-winning goals as the tiebreaker and I think this is a good way, but it's really up to you. You can double-click on any Olympic player in the pool standings to see their detailed statistics. You can also view player stats at http://www.iihf.com/channels10/olympics-2010/statistics.html.

If you have any questions, please post here as I am sure others will be interested in the thread.

The last game has been loaded. In case anyone missed it, Sidney Crosby was credited with the game winning goal. And no weird IIHF scoring rule was involved this time.

I hope you did better in your pool than I did in mine. My famous quote from after the draft ... "Everyone took the Canadian players too early."

Apparently, I was wrong.

If someone told me that with one game to go, Pavol Demitra would be winning the Olympic scoring race, I would have told them they were crazy.

However, this is little consolation for Demitra as the Slovaks came so close in the dying seconds, but again fell short and Finland took the bronze.

Note that I have marked both Finland and Slovakia as "eliminated" in the pool. Hard to classify the bronze medal winner as "eliminated", but it will make the Games Remaining column look more realistic. Not that it really matters - one game to go and if you picked all Russians, you aren't looking at the pool anymore anyway .... right Greg.

The semi-final games from Feb 26th have been loaded.

Only the medal games left. Both the gold medal and bronze medal game will count.

This means that if you are like me and have Mikko Koivu and Andrej Meszaros and are 11 points out of first, you still have a chance ....

Sweden is gone. Russia is gone. The Czech Republic is gone.

Games are loaded for the 24th. Check your teams and see what players you lost during the quarterfinals.

All games from Feb 23 have been loaded.

I hope you didn't pick the darkhorse teams as we're down to the expected 8. Check the "E" (for eliminated) column to see how many players you lost last night

The Canada - Russia game tomorrow should put a few poolies out of their misery.

Games from Feb 21st are now in the system.

Read 'em and weep.

All games will be included in the scoring for the Olympic pools. This includes the round-robin, the qualifying round, quarter finals, semi finals and medal games.

Games from Feb 20 have all been loaded.

Yet another quirky international scoring rule.

Patrick Elias scored in the dying seconds of the Czech Republic's Feb 19th game against Latvia. He scored into an empty net while the Czech's were shorthanded. NHL.com reports this as a EN-SH goal. Empty net, shorthanded. Makes sense to me.

However, the IIHF has not counted this goal as a short handed goal. They mark it as an ENG (empty net goal) in their boxscore and show Elias as having 0 shorthanded goals in the player statistics for the Czech Republic.

I assume this means that the IIHF does not count shorthanded goals if they are scored into an empty net - but I have not been able to find anything to confirm or disprove this theory. In the meantime, our system will match the IIHF statistics and not count this goal as shorthanded.

So if you have Elias on your team, and your pool awards points for shorthanded goals, you have something to gripe about.

If anyone has any info on EN-SH's in international play, feel free to post.