Pickology

Grow Your Office Pool

August 19, 2015 by hpadmin

Once you have started an office pool and you have the first season (or several seasons) as a pool manager under your belt and things have gone smoothly, it’s time to start seriously thinking about growing your pool. With more entries comes better competition, and what most people are interested in – bigger payouts. This also potentially leads to more time commitment and more responsibility for you. Thankfully with HostedPools, that’s generally not the case.

Here are a few of the key things to consider when growing your office pool:

1. Know What You Can Handle

You already have at least a season managing an office pool under your belt, so you should have a solid idea of the time commitment required at different parts of the season. That should give you a reasonable idea of how much more time and effort you can afford to devote to making your league operate well with an increase in entries. Thankfully, HostedPools is here to help you by handle updating stats for you, so most of the availability is required in the set up stages, sending invites and gathering entries and taking care of financials.

2. Set Realistic Goals

Once you’ve decided how many more teams you can reasonable handle, be sure to set a goal for you to strive towards. Just saying you want to grow your league isn’t enough. Set a specific number of entries to work towards that you think is attainable. You will be more focused in getting there if you have a realistic number in mind.

3. Existing Members

The key to growing an office pool, is keeping your existing entrants satisfied. It’s much easier to keep a ‘customer’ than it is to get a new one. If your existing participants enjoy your pool, they are also more likely to spread the word to their friends, and word of mouth is easily one of the best forms of ‘marketing’ your pool. They’re also apt to create multiple teams on their own to increase their chances as your pool gets larger. This is most often the case in survival/elimination type pools, so people can hedge their bets to take a shot at a big prize.

4. Selling Your Pool

What’s the best part about your league? Is it the high payout for first place, the multitude of payout spots, the competition or the daily interaction and smack talk with the other entrants? Is your league ultra-competitive or more casual? Knowing what potential poolies are looking for makes it a lot easier for you to ‘sell’ participating in your pool to them. As we mentioned in our start an office pool post, make the invitations as personable as possible. Mass messages don’t tend to work nearly as well.

5. Make It Easy

Create an email, PDF or a Google Doc of step by step instructions for how to join your pool, for both yourself and your existing entrants to use as a reference when recruiting new entrants. Be sure to be clear and concise, so your potential new entrants understand what to do. It’s always helpful when doing something new to have an easy to follow reference if you get stuck or confused by something. We have a one step link in our invites to make it easier to acquire new entrants.

6. Social Networking

Why not set up a fan page or group on Facebook so people can follow your pool, or post on Twitter using your pool name as a hashtag? It’s a good way to spread the word about your pool, and very easy for your participants to invite their friends to follow along. Be sure everyone is cool with their name being posted as a courtesy.

Do you have any other great tips for growing an office pool? (What has worked for you? What hasn’t?) Share them in the comments!

Start an Office Pool

August 9, 2015 by hpadmin

If you’ve ever thought about starting an office sports pool, we’re more than happy to help whether you use our service or not. We’ll walk you through the steps necessary to start an office pool that will be successful from the beginning. We have decades of experience managing office pools and fantasy sports leagues, and want to share some of what we’ve learned with you. A number of the things you’ll need to consider can be handled and managed on HostedPools.

1) Pick Your Sport/Format

If you’re thinking about starting an office pool, you likely already have a good idea of what sport you want to focus on, but every sport or major event tends to have several different format options for you to choose from. Some will take much more effort than others, so choose wisely. Take a look at the different office pool formats we have available and choose your favourite.

2) Make a List of Possible Entrants

Come up with a list of people or groups you know that may be interested in participating in your pool. If it’s a true office pool, confine it to those in your actual office or department. If not, that may still be a good group to start with. If you’re in other fantasy leagues or office pools, invite some of the participants if you know them. If you aren’t the manager/commish of that pool/league, you should ask permission before spamming their email list, asking people to join your pool. There are a bunch of other groups of people (teammates, classmates, etc.) that would be good to ask, and definitely don’t overlook the women. You may be surprised at the number of women that are in, or manage football pools on our site, including several winners.

3) Decide Entry Fee & Payout Structure

Once you’ve come up with your list of potential entrants, it’s time to think about your entry fee and your prize structure (assuming it’s not a Survivor/Winner take all type pool). As far as entry fee goes, it will depend on your entrants. The lower the entry fee, the more casual a fan/participant you’ll attract. The higher the entry fee, and the higher the overall payout ends up, the more serious player you’ll draw.

If your pool is starting small, your best bet is likely to make it a winner take all, or at most payout 2 positions. As your pool grows, you’ll want to pay out more prizes, and make the top prize a smaller percentage of the overall pie. Our rule of thumb for the pools we run is payout one spot for every 10 entrants in the pool, with the top prize being somewhere around 50% of the prize pool.

4) Decide Rules

All of the office pools on HostedPools.com have some pre-defined rules in place, but you do have some options, including multiple lives/strikes, as well as the type of defaults to use. Make sure your rules are targeted to your the type of entrants you listed and clearly communicated to them. It makes life as a pool manager a whole lot easier when you aren’t repeatedly answering the same questions.

5) Send Invitations

Once you have all of the details of your office pool set, it’s time to start filling up your pool. Go back to your list from step 2, and reach out to each one of them to invite them to join your new office pool. You can do the group email thing, but people are more likely to respond more positively to a more personal or individualized approach. HostedPools does have the ability to send out emails directly from your pool, both to the previous year’s entrants, or by submitted email addresses. We’ll take a look down the road at some strategies for growing your pool once it’s set up.

6) Keep Records

It’s very important to be transparent and keep meticulous records regarding your office pool. Keeping track of payments both coming in and going out, as well as any fees that will come out of the overall payout. Some of the fees you may have to consider are bank fees (if you set up a separate account, accepting paypal payments or sending Email Money Transfers to the winners) and the site hosting fee. Be sure to account for these in your payout structure, so you don’t find yourself out money for running your pool.

Also, for future years, keep track of who entered your pool, and how to contact them the following season. HostedPools offers both payment tracking for entries, as well as a listing of all of your entrants, which you can copy to a spreadsheet for your own records.

This should get you on your way to managing your office sports pool. We will be posting a handy checklist to aid you in the near future. Meanwhile, use ‘PICKOLOGY’ as your coupon code for a 10% discount on your first HostedPools Office Pool!

Create Your Office Pool

Win Your Survivor Football Pool

August 6, 2015 by hpadmin

Survivor Football Pools (also known as Eliminator Football) are probably the easiest type of football pool to run or participate in, but also one of the toughest to win. As it is with most football pools, the size of the pool should definitely be a consideration in how you want to play it. It’s somewhat similar to poker, where you play much differently in early stages of a multi-table tournament vs sitting down with the final few players. The difference, however, is in Survivor Football Pools, only one person gets paid, so you need to play to not only make it deep, but to put give yourself the best chance to actually win. Every move you make should be focused on being the last person standing, not just the person that made it through this week. If you participate in a decent sized Survivor Pool, one win likely makes you profitable over your lifetime of participating in these pools. It’s why you’ll find most people make multiple entries in a large pool.

Just Make it Through This Week

For a large portion of those that participate in a Survivor Football Pool, this is their strategy. They don’t look beyond the schedule for the current week, and tend to pick the team that’s the largest favourite for the week. While there is a time and a place for this strategy, the early stages of your pool, especially if you’re in a decent sized pool, is not it. If you do make it through, there’s a very good chance that most everyone else did as well, as most of your opponents will be riding the big favourites as well.

Once most of your pool is eliminated, and you’re down to only a handful of teams, this often turns into the best strategy. You don’t want to get cute and cost yourself the win, when the best option was staring you in the face all along. Plus if you’ve planned ahead for tough weeks, you very well may have better remaining options than your opponents.

Plan for Tough Weeks in the Schedule

This is always a good way to start your planning for the season, and can give you a huge advantage once you’re into the mid-season bye weeks. Knowing when there’s only 1 or 2 really good options in a week, and saving those options until that week can give you a pretty good advantage when you get there. The first thing I do each season, is to look at the entire schedule week by week, and find the games where the spread is likely to be 7 or higher, with double digit spreads being more valuable. Circle the weeks where there are the fewest of these options available, and make note of which teams are key in each of those weeks. Try not to burn those teams early in the season, and then when others are scrambling to find a decent pick, you’ll be sitting pretty with what should be a relatively safe selection.

Obviously, things can change in a hurry during the 17 week grind that is the NFL schedule, but having a plan will definitely give you a leg up on those that are flying by the seat of their pants.

Don’t Take the Most Popular Picks

Early on in a Survivor Pool, we advise against taking the biggest favourites as they’ll be the most popular selections for the week, as you have less to gain by doing so. Consider a week where close to 75% of all entries take the biggest favourite. If you’ve also selected this team, you don’t really gain much expected value if you make it through. If you stayed away from this team, and they were upset, you’re down to only a quarter of the entries surviving, and you have a much greater shot at winning the pool. And really, that’s what it’s all about, giving yourself the best shot to win the entire thing. You may say, well that never happens, but it seems to happen at least once every season or two. I remember a New England/Arizona game a few seasons ago which completely decimated pools in Week 2. The season before that, Seattle knocked off the Giants in Jersey as double digit underdogs. Always remember your end goal…not just surviving, but giving yourself the best chance to be the sole survivor.

Things to Consider

West Coast Teams – When these teams play the early games on the east coast, it’s like their 10am for their body clock. Take note when one of these teams plays back to back on the east coast though, as some teams will stay east between the 2 games. The same can be said for East Coast teams going west.

Byes or Short Weeks – Keep an eye on teams playing following a bye or a short week. The extra rest and time to game plan an opponent can make a big difference.

Divisional Opponents – A lot of entries like to avoid taking divisional opponents or big rivalry games where possible. Most teams get up for their rivals and these are often tougher games to pick.

Road Teams – Most people try to avoid picking road teams as much as possible.

Trap Games – I try to avoid a good team going on the road in between 2 divisional opponents or rivalry games, as there is a tendency to look past a lesser opponent and focus on those big divisional games.

New Coaching Staffs – Early in the season, it’s often a good idea to avoid teams with new coaching staffs, that may be implementing all new systems. Football is a sport that thrives on familiarity and consistency, so an overhaul of the staff or the playbook can make for some early season hiccups. Give these teams a few weeks to work out the kinks before putting your entry on the line with them.

Obviously, you won’t be able to avoid all of these situations during the course of your season, but keep them in mind when making your selections and you’ll be much further ahead than most.