Pickology

Dominating Office Pools

Loser Hockey Pool on Hosted Pools

The Loser Hockey Pool, is a variation on the Survivor or Eliminator Hockey Pool, which features more specific rules.  It’s a format where one person will often set up multiple entries to take a shot at the winner take all prize.

Loser Hockey Pool Basics

For each Saturday of the NHL regular season, you pick a team to lose their game that day.  If they lose, prior to the shoot-out, you proceed to the following week.  If they win the game, or lose the game in a shoot-out, you are eliminated from the pool.   The origins of the Loser Hockey Pool go back to the days of NHL ties, and still treat shoot-out games as ties/eliminations.  Each entry may only select a team once for the duration of the pool.  The pool runs until you’re down to only one remaining entry, or the regular season ends.

If the pool makes it to the end of the regular season with multiple entries alive, they would split the prize money equally.  Entries may also choose to split the prize once the pool only has a few remaining.  We recommend a partial split with entries still playing to be the sole survivor.

On HostedPools, our deadlines for Loser Hockey Pools are always at Noon (Eastern) on Saturdays.  We are considering modifying this for the 2015-2016 season, to be puck drop of the first game on the schedule.

Loser Hockey Pool Options

Multiple Lives/Strikes

You can set up your Loser Hockey Pool to allow for multiple chances for each entry, so you’re not eliminated until you’ve accumulated the necessary strikes.  It’s a solid option unless you have a very large pool, as these tend to only last a couple months out of a 6 month season.  As a result, many pools will allow 2 or 3 strikes, and still run a first half and a second half pool (ask us about our 2nd pool in same season discount!).

Default Picks

Set up a default pick option, so when someone forgets, or is unable to make a pick, they still end up with a selection according to the default pick criteria.  HostedPools doesn’t currently have hockey pool defaults, but we are considering adding them for the 2016 season.  Pool Managers can however choose their own criteria and set picks as necessary for anyone that hadn’t chosen.

   Set Up Your Loser Hockey Pool

Start an Office Pool

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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

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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.

Pick 5 Football Pool on Hosted Pools

The Pick 5 Football Pool is our newest offering at HostedPools.  It’s a variation on the basic Pick’em Football Pool, where you only select 5 games each week instead of the 13 to 16 that are usually on the schedule.  It’s become quite a popular set up, as there is a huge one run by one of the Vegas Hotels for serious money, dubbed the SuperContest.  You can set up your own version with us!

Pick 5 Football Pool Basics

For each week of the NFL regular season, you pick the winners of 5 different games for the week.  Each pick you make is against the spread, so if you take the favourite, they have to win, and cover the spread for you to earn a point.  If you take the underdog, and they lose by less than the spread, you earn a point. If the team you pick “pushes” (the home team score plus the spread value, equals the visitors score), you earn a half a point for that game.

On HostedPools, our deadlines are always at 1pm (Eastern) on Sundays, but we allow you to select a team from an earlier game as long as your pick is in prior to the listed game time.

Pick 5 Football Pool Options

The Spread

Pick 5 Football Pools generally use The Spread, but if you have more casual fans/entrants, you could always make them pick 5 games straight up.

   Set Up Your Pick 5 Football Pool

 

Loser Football Pool on Hosted Pools

The Loser Football Pool is hands down our favourite football pool at HostedPools.com.   It’s actually the pool that started it all, as we were setting one up and were unable to find any sites that had this format.  As far as I know, we’re still the only one offering it.

The Loser Pool is a very unique format, and is a great change for people bored of the same old pick’em type pool.  It’s a great challenge for even the best of cappers.

Loser Football Pool Basics

Every NFL team is assigned a point value for the season, which is the first round draft order for simplicity’s sake.  The defending champion is worth 32 points, while the team with the worst record, earning the first overall pick is only worth 1 point.

For each week of the NFL season, including playoffs, you pick a team to lose their game.  If they lose, you add the point value of that team to your running total for the season.  If they win or the game ends in a tie, you get no points for that week.  There is no restriction to the number of times an entry may select a team.  At the end of the season, the highest score wins.

On HostedPools, our deadlines are always at 1 pm (Eastern) on Sundays, but we allow you to select a team from an earlier game as long as your pick is in prior to the listed game time.

Loser Football Pool Options

Default Picks

Set up one of our default pick options, so when someone forgets, or is unable to make a pick, they still end up with a selection according to the default pick criteria.

   Set Up Your Loser Football Pool

 

About Pickology

Pickology is the official blog of HostedPools.
Our mission is to make your office pool the best it can be. We provide the management tools and information for organizing office football and hockey pools. Our goal is to be the ultimate one stop destination for anyone with an interest in or questions about office pools.
We also aim to share strategies and analysis to help you win your office pool.

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