NCAA Tournament Pool Help

The NCAA Tournament Pool Site

Welcome to the NCAA Tournament Pool Site. Here you can try your luck at predicting the outcome of all 63 games of the NCAA men's basketball chamionship. You can do the following:

Create your own public or private pools
Enter your own picks into tournament pools
Follow the progress of your entries and the tournament

Below is a description of the features of the site. Once you have logged into the site, you are taken to the your main page. This page will display your options, your entries, and your pools. The following are your options:

Main - brings you back to your main page
Enter Pool - allows you to enter your picks in a pool
Create Pool - allows you to create a new pool
Invite Others - provides a means of inviting email recipients to join a pool
Change Password - use this option to change your site password
Sign Off - logs you off of the site

Create Pool Page

The Create Pool Page is used can be used to create your own pools. To create a pool you must specify several settings.

Title - The title of the pool is it's name as generally displayed throughout the website.

Alias - This is a shorter name used to directly access the pool.

Visibility - The visibility defines who is able to see your pool. There are two types of pools, public and private. Public pools are visible and can be entered by anyone logged into the site. Private pools can only be entered by users who know the id or alias of the private pool. This value is known by the creator of the pool and can be distributed to whomever the creator wants.

Sure Losers

A sure loser is a team you feel will lose its first game. In some pools, you will need to select a number of sure losers with each entry. If one of your sure losers wins a game, you will not only not get points for that game, but you will lose points. For example, suppose the tournament features a game between #1 seed Duke and #16 seed Metro State. Since no #16 seed has ever won a game in the tournament, you select Metro State as a sure loser. And suppose first round games are worth one point in your pool. Now suppose Metro State shocks the world and beats Duke. Your entry will lose one point. If Metro State wins its next game your entry will lose the points for that game as well.

Scoring Method - The scoring method of a pool defines how points are awarded to entries in the pool. There are three types of scoring methods, doubling, progressing, and custom.

Doubling - correct picks are awarded points in the following way, 1 point for first round games, 2 for the second, 4 for the third, then 8, 16, and 32 for the remaining rounds.
Progressive - correct picks are awarded points in the following way, 1 point for first round games, 2 for the second, 4 for the third, then 7, 11, and 16 for the remaining rounds.
Custom - you can choose how many points are awaded games in each round. You can weight points based on round and team seeding.

Repicks

The repicks feature allows you to create a pool in which your participants can change their picks in between specific rounds. You may find that this keeps the player's interest in the pool longer even despite early poor picks. If you choose this option, you will be asked to specify the following:

In between which rounds can repicks be made
How many repicks can be made in these situations
Whether the player's champion pick can be changed

Once the tournament is underway, repicks cannot be made until a round is complete. Then if a pool allows repicks for the position in the tournament, participants can change their picks under the following provisions:

A participant may not change his or her pick for a game which is complete
A participant may only choose between teams which he or she picked to advance. For example, suppose a player originally chose the following results:

Team A defeats Team B in game 1
Team C defeats Team D in game 2
Team A defaults Team C in game 3

and suppose Team B actually defeats Team A in game 1 setting up a matchup between teams B and C. The player who chose Team A may change his pick for game 3, but only to Team C as he did not chose Team B originally.

A participant may change any number of picks up to the maximum specified in the pool settings. This includes cascading changes. Using the previous example, suppose that the player chose Team A to continue on another round in the tournament. If he changes his pick for game 3 to Team C, the effect on the subsequent game is to change the pick from Team A to Team C as well. This counts as 2 changes. If that player only had one remaining repick, the change from Team A to Team C would be disallowed.
If the pool is set up to disallow the change of a player's champion pick, then no picks may be changed in which the champ is involved.

Tie Breaker - the tie breaker of the pool is used to determine the winner of the pool in the event that there are at least two top entries with the same score. The tie breaker can be anything you choose. The value you enter in this field is text that tells the entrant what type of value to enter. For example, the default is "Total Points Scored in the Final Game" indicating that the entrant should enter a point total with their entry.

Tracking Paid Status

Some pools are pay-to-play pools, that is participants must pay to enter. Choosing "Track Paid Status" allows you, as the pool administrator, to track which participants have paid and which haven't. If you choose this option, then the main pool page will have an extra column for each entry indicating whether the entry has been paid for. You can toggle the paid status of each entry by clicking on the check in the column.

Enter Pool Page

The Enter Pool Page allows you to add a entry to an existing pool. It will display all public pools which have not been locked. It will also allow for the entry of the id of a private pool. Click a public pool title or entry a private pool id and click "Enter" to begin entering your picks. This will take you to the Entry Page. Private pool ids are available to the creator of the private pool.

Pool Page

This page allows displays the current entries in a specific pool. Once the tournament has begun the page will display the standings of entries in the pool. This page can be reached by selecting a pool name in the main site page.

Edit Entry Page

This page displays a specific pool entry. Before the tournament has begun, this page is used to select the picks for the entry. Once the tournament has begun, the page is used to view picks. There are several aspects of an entry that can be edited in this page:

Picks - choose which team you believe will win each game of the tournament. Click on a blue are to advance a team to the next game or right click on a game to pick the specific team you think will win that game. Click on the X next to a game to clear the selection for that game.
Name - each entry has a name identifying the entry
Tie breaker - enter a value used to break ties in the tournament. The value will depend on the specific pool but general represents how many points you think will be scored in the final game of the tournament.
Sure losers - pick your sure losers by either selecting the lowest seeds automatically via the button at the bottom of the page, or by selecting individual teams as sure losers by clicking on the skull and crossbones symbol in the team's box on the page. The number of sure losers you need to pick depends on the pool

Once you're done editing your entry, click ok to save the entry. Do not use the browser's Back or Forward buttons during editing or your changes will be lost.