TOURNEY LOGIC: BLOGS

Interesting Use for myPlayoffs.com

Joel Ross — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:36:00 GMT

One of the best parts of putting out a piece of software is seeing the different ways people use it - especially the unintended uses. That's part of the reason I have a search feed for most of the domains we launch. myPlayoffs.com is one of those searches, and recently, I came across a forum post about your favorite movie. They're using myPlayoffs.com to track the results, which isn't at all how we pictured the site to be used.

Of course, that's just fine with us. It's great to see people using it and it definitely gives us some ideas of how we can improve the system - we could build in the voting mechanisms right into the site!

Personally, my money's on The Hunt For Red October.

Tags: myPlayoffs.com

Creating Your First Bracket On myPlayoffs.com

Joel Ross — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:01:00 GMT

myPlayoffs.com has been live for a little while now, and the feedback has been good, so I figured this would be a good time to highlight what you can do with it and explain some of the concepts behind the features. Maybe it'll even give you a little view into what's planned down the line.

Registering with myPlayoffs

To start, we need to register. We opted to use Live ID for membership, so you sign in with your Windows Live ID. Then you're prompted to finish your user profile.

From there, you're on the "My Brackets" page, where you can create a bracket. You also have the option of clicking over to the "My Tournaments" tab, and create a tournament.

So what's the difference between a bracket and a tournament, you ask? Well, a bracket is just one individual, stand alone bracket. A Tournament is a collection of brackets, and is good for collecting a set of brackets. Think 3-on-3 basketball tournaments where you have different brackets for different age groups, but they're all part of the same weekend tournament.

Creating and Viewing a Bracket

To start, let's create an 8 team bracket - we'll create the 2007 MLB Playoffs. First, we set up some basic information about the bracket.

Once done, we go to the bracket management page. Here, we can change each competitor to match the MLB bracket. The editing is done right in the bracket, making the data entry pretty easy.

Now the bracket's ready, so we can view the public page, which everyone can see.

Managing Results

Once some results start to come in, we can enter them in the bracket - quickly and easily.

Now that the bracket is finished, the public page shows the overall results.

You can see the final results for yourself here, but that's the basics for publishing brackets. It's pretty simple and straight forward. There's another feature that I didn't show here, but we do have a feature where anyone can report a result to the bracket publisher. In the screen shot above, there's a button called "Report Matchup Result" and if you click that, you can select a winner and a round, click Submit, and an email is sent to the bracket publisher so they know a result has come in.

We have many features planned for the future, but this is a very basic step in the right direction!

Tags: myPlayoffs | Brackets

Announcing MyPlayoffs.com

Brian Anderson — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:08:00 GMT

We are very happy to announce the release of MyPlayoffs.com. MyPlayoffs lets's you publish and manage playoff brackets and tournaments.

It is a long story but this idea has been with us for almost 3 years now. I finally came up with a design in my head that was much simpler to implement so I made myself work on it. I am pretty happy with the functionality for v1. There are lot's more ideas so you should see some updates to it soon.

PayItSquare Widget

Brian Anderson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:54:00 GMT

If you are interested in using a widget to help you collect money we have the answer. Here is an example of the Pay It Square widget we just published on WidgetBox.com

Pay It Square Visual Upgrade

Brian Anderson — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:57:00 GMT

We just finished re-skinning Pay It Square (www.payitsquare.com). It is a major visual upgrade with a new color scheme and logo. Let us know what you think.

Building a .Net Startup - PayItSquare.com

Brian Anderson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:53:00 GMT

I have recently been doing a presentation about building a start up web business using .net technology.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation and code samples from my .net user group presentation on 9/18/2007. You can find the NuSoft Framework on CodePlex.

Here is the synopsis of my presentation:

Building A .Net Startup

Building a .Net application from scratch can be daunting. There are so many ways to build an application and many of the early decisions affect your future development efforts significantly. Brian Anderson will open up the hood and walkthrough the details of how he architected and developed one of his startup businesses, PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com). He will walk through building UI, business and data layers (with LINQ!), leveraging ASP.NET SQL membership, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit, SQL Server 2005 and credit card processing using PayPal’s Website Payment Pro. The goal of this talk is to show how you bring all the details together to get your ideas off the ground successfully using .Net.

Speaker Bio:
Brian Anderson is a Solutions Director at NuSoft Solutions and owner of Tourney Logic (www.tourneylogic.com). He specializes in consulting, architecting and leading development of scalable .Net applications for well-known business such as National City Mortgage (www.nationalcityhomeloans.com) and entrepreneurs with great startup businesses such as Spout (www.spout.com), Indistr.com (www.indistr.com) and Crayon Interface (www.crayoninterface.com) to name a few. Brian is also among of the first group to be accepted into PayPal’s new PayPal Certified Developer program.

NuSoft Framework

Brian Anderson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:46:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that the NuSoft Framework is now an open source framework. We used this to help build the PayItSquare website. Joel just posted a nice introduction to the NuSoft Framework.

Presenting on Tuesday Night

Brian Anderson — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:18:00 GMT

I will be presenting my “Building a .Net Startup” presentation on Tuesday Sept. 18 at 6pm for the West Michigan .net user group. Here is my synopsis:

Building A .Net Startup

Building a .Net application from scratch can be daunting. There are so many ways to build an application and many of the early decisions affect your future development efforts significantly. Brian Anderson will open up the hood and walkthrough the details of how he architected and developed one of his startup businesses, PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com). He will walkthrough building UI, business and data layers (with LINQ!), leveraging ASP.NET SQL membership, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit, SQL Server 2005 and credit card processing using PayPal’s Website Payment Pro. The goal of this talk is to show how you bring all the details together to get your ideas off the ground successfully using .Net.

I will post the PPT and code samples after the presentation.

PayPal Certified Developer

Brian Anderson — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:49:00 GMT

It is official. I am now a PayPal certified developer. All the work I did with PayItSquare.com and Indistr.com made it easy to pass the exam.

MIX 07 Highlights

Brian Anderson — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:42:00 GMT

The MIX 07 sessions are now posted online here: http://sessions.visitmix.com/. This a gold mind of information for ramping up on key custom dev Microsoft technologies. The best place to start is the keynote. Fast forward to the demos to get a sense of what is possible:

The key highlights of this conference include:

Silverlight - www.silverlight.net. This is more than just a Flash competitor. The integration with ASP.Net, JavaScript and code behind CLR assemblies make this a very powerful addition to Microsoft development stack. The other big part of this plug-in is that a subset of the .Net CLR is now available cross platform, finally! It still is early and the marketing is a little misleading. There are actually two versions. Version 1.0 is a beta that doesn't support code behind technology or any controls. It is primarily designed to compete for media applications like showing videos online. All of the code is done with Javascript programming in the browser against the Silverlight DOM. Version 1.1 is the when the code behind functionality will be supported and it is slated for a end of 2007 release. Scott Guthrie has posted an excellent post higlighting the difference between 1.0 and 1.1. Check out this session if you want to see the lead Silverlight product manager show off what is available in 1.0: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV11&disc=&id=1520&year=2007&search=DEV11

WPF - If you want to see the power of this technology and what you can do with Blend you have to watch this session done by two designers. It is awesome to watch: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2011&pid=DES07&disc=&id=1509&year=2007&search=DES07.

AJAX - http://ajax.asp.net. This has been getting a ton of coverage over the past year but I have to tell you the more I learn about using the object model the more the power of this framework becomes apparent. There is way more to Asp.net AJAX than just the Update Panel! Take time to review the client script API. Here is a great session to watch done by Nikhil Kothari , a very well known ASP.NET architect: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2011,2012&pid=XD003&disc=&id=1570&year=2007&search=XD003

LINQ - This will speed up the plumbing development work we do for almost every application we develop. Why couldn't we have had this 5 years ago??? :) See Anders Hejlsberg , the author of C#, explains it very well in this session: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV04&disc=&id=1513&year=2007&search=DEV04

Orcas - Multi-targeting framework development, CSS and Javascript intellisense support make this install a must even during the beta period. This is a nice overview of what is coming: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV14&disc=&id=1523&year=2007&search=DEV14

Feedburner

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:16:00 GMT

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

I just setup a Feedburner for this blog. I wanted to test the headline animator.

MIX 07

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:11:00 GMT

Joel and I are both attending the MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas starting April 30. I am very interested to see the lastest WPF, ASP.NET AJAX and LINQ demos. Scott Guthrie is presenting on all of this and always gives a great demo talks.

We used ASP.NET AJAX extensively in both PayItSquare and MyPlayoffs. It really simplifies Javascript development and makes the web applications much easier to use.

I am especially looking forword to LINQ and DLINQ. We had to build Code Smith templates to generate business objects and data access layers in the past. I am hoping this new technology will simplify this type of work and still be extensible enough to accomplish all of the logic we have to support in our business layers.

WPF is the next logical step for the Tourney Bracket Control at some point. We want to support both Web and Windows with a unified format!

Perfect Use of Tourneytopia.com

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 03:43:00 GMT

I wanted to highlight a customer called Amos Hutchison and Associates. They used Tourneytopia to promote their firm and connect with existing and new clients by running a March Madness contest - http://www.tourneytopia.com/MarchMadness/ahacpas/Default.aspx.

They did a very nice job of branding their site and gave a way great prizes as well.

It is fun to see customers use the system like this. It is exactly what we had in mind when built the site.

Tourney Logic is Busier Than Ever!

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 03:31:00 GMT

It has been way to long since I have blogged anything for Tourney Logic. The reason is that I have been spending every free moment developing our next services. Here is a quick update of what we have been and are working on.

Tourneytopia.com (www.tourneytopia.com)

We have invested major amounts of time into upgrading the Tourneytopia website. The key upgrade is that we made all of the tournament contests template based. We have made it very easy to setup a custom contest template with any number of competitors that allows for private-labeled pools to be based on. This is how we are able to support the Tennis Channel. They have contest that have 128 competitors like the Australian Open and others with 96 which include a bunch of first round byes. The Tourney Bracket Control is flexible enough to support all of this programmatically. We also made major updates to the layout and skin look and feel. We also added a email notification system that keeps participants updated after each round. We plan to continue to upgrade this site with many more features each year.

PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com)

This is a new and exciting addition to the Tourney Logic family of websites. The idea came to me by playing in soccer leagues for many years. I realized how much effort it was for the team captains to manage the team's registration every season. Most times the team managers would pay the entire registration fee up front so they could get our schedules. Then they would pester people for weeks to collect all of the money. Many times they wouldn't even collect everyone's payments. Part of the reason for this is because it was way to hard for them to stay organized or they just felt bad about pestering all the time. The other thing is most of us wanted to pay them on time but we just always forgot our checkbooks!

That is where PayItSquare.com comes into play. It allows Team Managers to setup a Group Payment with amount they need, they load the people they want to collect money from, then they can automatically send them a Payment Request email. The Group Payment Members get a link to a Member Collection page where they can pay online with their credit card. As soon as they pay online the Team Manager get with a PayPal payment. If they collect the money offline they can mark the member paid manually which keeps them organized and also lets everyone see who has paid on the Member Collection page.

We beta tested it this past soccer season and it was a huge success. I was actually surprised that so many people paid online. The team managers that used it liked it so much they actually wrote testimonials that I posted on the site.

There are a few more upgrades we are planning for this site in the near future. The major one is to allow for custom payment amounts by member. Right now every member is billed an even amount which is just the amount request divided by the number of group members. We had some requests for custom amounts and it makes sense because sometimes two people fill one roster spot. I can also see other reasons for this outside of sports leagues.

MyPlayoffs.com (www.myplayoffs.com)

This site has been in the works for years now. I am happy to say that we are actually almost done developing the first release. It is a tournament management website. It allows users to setup private labeled tournament websites and manage them. Kind of like Blogger for tournaments! We provide all the tools to manage an entire tournament event. This includes teams, players, draws, brackets of any size, registration, content publishing, printing and more! We are very excited about this venture. It will be free to use because it will be advertisement supported. We are expecting to launch the beta version of this site before May 2007. It will launch with Single Elimination bracket support. We are planning to add double elimination and round robin support shortly after we get the initial site launched.

As you can see, we have been busy! If you want more information about Tourney Logic or any of these sites just email us at sales@tourneylogic.com.

Tourneytopia.com's Content Placeholders

Joel Ross — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:08:00 GMT

I received an email tonight asking about our content customization abilities on Tourneytopia.com and realized we don't have great descriptions of what each one does. So, until I can get it in the system, I'll post what each does here.

Top Ad Placeholder: Shows up in the header on every page next to the pool logo. This is meant for a banner ad.
Top Body Placeholder: Shows just under the header on every page. Spans across all content on the page.
Right Ad Placeholder: Shows up on the right side of the content on every page. This is meant for something like a tower ad.
Welcome Placeholder: Shows up under the header and Top Body Placeholder in the upper left corner on the pool's home page only.
Rules Page Placeholder: Shows up in the rules section of the scoring page.
Scoring Placeholder: Shows up at the top of the scoring details section on the scoring page.
Access Code Placeholder: used on the home page of a pool if you require your users to enter an access code to get to your pool. It won't show once they enter the access code.
Entry Confirmation Placeholder: This will show on the screen to the user once they submit their pick.
Entry Email Placeholder: This will be the email that gets sent to the user once they submit their pick.
Tie Breaker Placeholder: This is the text to use for tie breaker one during entry submission.
Tie Breaker 2 Placeholder: This is the text to use for tie breaker two during entry submission.
Notification Placeholder: This will be the introduction text used when notifications are sent out - this year, a notification will be sent out after results for each round are entered.

That's 12 places that content can be modified - I didn't even realize it had gotten to be that many until I sat down tonight and wrote this out!

Tourneytopia.com's Teams Are Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:40:00 GMT

We usually plan a couple of hours to get the brackets entered into Tourneytopia.com, but we always hope it doesn't take that long. And that's the case this year too. If you've got a pool over there, you're all set to take entries, and if you don't, it's not too late to sign up!

Tourneytopia 2007

Brian Anderson — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:25:00 GMT

Tourneytopia.com is ready for private-labeled pools again this year.

Tourneytopia Updates

Joel Ross — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:46:00 GMT

Usually, after March Madness is done, Tourney Logic sits relatively dormant for a few months as we recover from the rush, which usually starts in November or December (getting upgrades ready to go) and culminates in March with the tournament. For us, it means many, many late nights pounding out features and bug fixes until we meet our vision.

And once it's over, we usually end up a little burned out. But not this year. We've been working hard to get a new release of Tourneytopia out the door, and there's some really cool features in it.

First, some back story on where Tourneytopia came from. This year, we decided to move the Tourney Pool Manager to .NET 2.0 and make use of some of the cool and exciting new features available. And that's what we did, only it took longer than expected. We knew it was technically ready to go, but there were still some bugs and decisions to be made about how to best release it. Ultimately, we made the decision to use last year's version of the Tourney Pool Manager (running on .NET 1.1) as is and take the upgraded version and make it a hosted-only version. By doing this, we could fix bugs right through the tournament (which we did, although, luckily, no major bugs showed up), and we didn't have to worry about deployment as much - we can deal with manual deployment steps, where as a software package needs to be automated.

In the long run, it was the right decision. In the short run, we continued a few poor design decisions from years past so we could get it done. All in all, it didn't really hurt us - this year. We knew where the inefficiencies were, and, despite having a ton more traffic than I expected, the server held up fine - after a few late tweaks we made before certain features were used.

But we knew those decisions would ultimately hinder us going forward, so we looked at a re-architecture of the whole site. Ultimately, we came up with a Codesmith template that generated all of our business objects (more on that later), and rewrote the site's foundation. For the most part, the UI is the same, but the framework it's running on is much more scalable and efficient.

But this isn't the post to get into that. From an end user's perspective, this new back end gives us the ability to support more than just a 64-team tournament - you can now create tourmanents for any number of teams, such as the 16 team tournament for the World Cup.

Which is exactly what we are offering now - the World Cup. The window is small - the bracket play starts less than 24 hours from when the group play ends, so there's not a lot of time to enter, but it should be fun!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Fifa | World+Cup

The Benefits of Being a VIP...

Joel Ross — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:15:00 GMT

...arent' exactly what they're cracked up to be! Somehow, I got on the VIP list to watch NCAA games online this year, and in case you were wondering if you were missing anything, well, this pretty much sums it up.

Technorati Tags: NCAA | basketball | VIP | mmod

March Madness 2006 Is Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:59:00 GMT

We just finished updating the teams for this year, so if you are a Tourneytopia.com user or a Tourney Pool Manager user, the teams will be downloaded shortly, if they haven't been already!

Now, I have to go back and actually look at the seeds. When you're focused on data entry, you don't get a very good look at what's going on!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Tourney+Pool+Manager | March+Madness | Brackets | Selection+Sunday

Tourneytopia's Speed Boost

Joel Ross — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:54:00 GMT

If you happened to be perusing Tourneytopia's offerings early this morning (around 12:30 or 1:00 AM), you might have noticed a little bit of downtime - something we are very cognizant of as we get close to the Big Dance. We try our best to prevent down time, unless we have a good reason. This time, we had a good one - we switched servers to one that's much faster.

The NCAA tournament presents a challenge - there are five days when you get absolutely pounded. From the time the selections are made until that first game, we typically get more traffic than any full month (other than March, obviously), so we want to make sure that we are on a server that can handle it. So, last night, that's what we did. Moving the domain and getting the new environment all set up gave us a little bit of downtime, but overall, I don't think we were down for more than 5 minutes, if that. We had the new machine set up, and was just waiting for the DNS to switch over. We did have one deployment issue, and that was the license for the Tourney Bracket Control - yes, we even have to have a license! We use the same build you can get on our site.

Anyway, we're all moved over and don't have anything that we want to add, so now it's just a waiting game. Tomorrow will get hectic again, and around 5:00 PM or so, we'll be busy again. We want to watch the Go-Live process and ensure that everything works as expected, and then at 6:00 PM, it'll be time to get the teams in. By 7:00 PM, we hope to be live and ready to go, and by 8:00 PM, most pools will be open to accept picks. We'll monitor it all and ensure everything runs smoothly, as we will all week.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | March+Madness | Selection+Sunday

Late Nights With Tourneytopia

Joel Ross — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:36:00 GMT

Here we are, about 1:30 AM, and I'm just finishing up deploying a minor (very minor) update to Tourneytopia. We're definitely starting to stabilize, as we were able to skip a build last night, and both tonight's and Sunday's build were purely cosmetic.

Now, Saturday's build was a different story. We had some major fixes in there. The web services we expose weren't working, so we fixed those. We didn't (and still haven't, really) hyped those, but we offer a few feeds that allow you to get data out of Tourneytopia, so you can use it on your own site. There's quite a few integration scenarios that you can do, so instead of just listing out what we offer, we'll walk through a quick scenario.

Let's say you run a forum and you decide to use Tourneytopia as a promotion for your members. First, you set up a custom user demographic field to collect their forum member id (we're hoping to have a better user account integration story later this year), and once all picks are submitted and the window closes, you go export all of the entries and users to an excel file. Work a little data magic, and you can import entry IDs for each user in the system. That's the first part. Now, whenever a user comes to the site, you can do a couple of things. First, the simple one. You can show them the top overall standings. Then, you can show them how they are doing - you can query our site for information about their entry IDs, and we'll give you information about them, including their total points and current rank.

But that's not all. You're the forum administrator and everyone knows you. So you set yourself up as a Featured Entry. You can also query Tourneytopia to get the featured entries and show them on your site too. You can also get the featured entries based on an entry - so you can show a user how their pick is doing against the featured entries.

You can also query the standings by name, email address and entry id, so you also have some searching capabilities too. Overall, it's a nice way to bring some of the information in Tourneytopia back and be able to use it in your site. Of course, if you just want the standings, you can just use the RSS feed that we have for those.

One last feature we added? A new way to upload images. Before, we allowed you to upload an image and then we put a size on it. Unless you did some planning to get a logo the size we specified, you could end up with a pretty distorted image. So we fixed that, and now are using a tool that resizes your image to fit into our space, but keeps the image looking good.

I'll talk more about that tool a little later, but if you want to check it out, head over to Tourneytopia and set up your own pool, and test it out.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | web+services | images

Tourneytopia's New Look

Joel Ross — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 01:25:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, we decided we couldn't wait for the final logo to launch Tourneytopia.com, so we went with a nice little text-based header, with plans to switch once we had a real header. Well, today, our designer, who's been awesome for us thus far, delivered again, sending a few different sizes we can use. So, with that, I'm happy to show you guys our new logo:

I'm very happy with how it turned out! What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia

Bracket Filling Logic

Joel Ross — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 02:16:00 GMT

Now that the Tourney Bracket Control is in the wild, lets talk about how a bracket should be laid out. This is one of the things we changed in the Tourney Bracket Control (TBC) 2.0 - we've extracted away the complexities of how brackets should be created and allowed developers to focus on what they want to do with the data coming from the bracket. We're confident that this will make developing with the Tourney Bracket Control much simpler, and you'll be able to get a bracket up and running a LOT faster than before because you don't have to think about the details ahead of time. And in case you don't beleive it, we went ahead and did just that. From our Quickstarts, we created a page where you can quickly add and remove teams from a bracket. The code to do this is quite simple, and just so you know it's not smoke and mirrors, here it is:

protected void AddButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Bracket1.Competitors.Add(new BracketCompetitor());
}

protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   if (Bracket1.Competitors.Count <= 2)
      RemoveButton.Enabled = false;
else
      RemoveButton.Enabled = true;
}

protected void RemoveButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Bracket1.Competitors.Remove(Bracket1.Competitors[Bracket1.Competitors.Count - 1]);
}

As you can see, it's dirt simple to do. The PreRender code isn't technically needed - this just ensures you don't ever drop below two competitors (and seriously, what good is a bracket for one team?). But since it's so simple to build, of course that means that we're worrying the details. Now, when you're working with the TBC, you won't really need to know how we figured out the layout and how teams are assigned. You'll just need to know where the competitors are assigned, and go from there. But I'm sure some out there will be curious about how we're doing it under the hood.

And I'm here to help.

The simple case is pretty easy. This is when the number of teams is a power of two - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. Why is this the easy case? Well, the first round is always full. There aren't any byes. Things get a little tricky when you have byes in the first round. Let's say you have 13 teams. This means that three teams get a bye in the first round. So, where do you assign teams and where do you give byes? The easiest way would be to assign two teams to each of the first round games, and the bottom three would be byes, but that's not right. Why? Well, in the second round, you'd end up with two teams who got byes playing each other. Teams usually earn byes, which means that teams 1-3 would have earned the right to take a round off. Making team 1 and team 2 play in the second round would be unfair to both of them.

So, what's the proper way to create the match ups? Well, it turns out to be an iterative process. Instead of starting in the first round, you actually start with the final round and work backwards. The final game has two "feeding" games. Game 1 feeds Game 2 if the winner of Game 1 becomes one of the competitors in Game 2. Creating the feeding games is pretty straight forward. You don't have much of a choice. The next two match ups are either the upper feeder or the lower feeder. The next set is more complicated. You have two match ups that each have two feeders. Like I mentioned before, you can't just do it in order - if you only had two match ups left, you'd end up with the top match up having two feeders and the other having none - an unfair situation.

So, you number the open slots 1 through 4. Start with one, then go to 4, back to two and finally slot 3. The next round you have 8 feeder slots for 4 match ups. The process is the same, except now a pattern starts to develop. If you number the slots 1 through 8, the slot assignment order works out like this: 1, 8, 4, 5, 2, 7, 3, 6. The sum of each pair is one plus the number of slots. But the pattern is more than just summing up to 9. It also can be continued for the next round. You get 16 slots, and the easiest way to determine what the slot assignment order for the next round is to take the assignment order from the previous round and add your numbers into it. Treat each element as one half of the pair, and remember that each pair adds up to 17 (16 slots + 1). So the order becomes: 1, 16 (17-1), 8, 9 (17-8), 4, 13 (17-4 - you get the idea right?), 5, 12, 2, 15, 7, 10, 3, 14, 6, 11. Yes, these are the same seed pairings as you'll see in the NCAA tourney.

The advantage of doing it this way is that you can stop at any point and have a valid bracket. If you only have thirteen teams for 16 slots, then slots 14, 6 and 11 are open. This makes the bye situation much more reasonable.

Now, from a Tourney Bracket Control perspective, we make things a little more friendly. Instead of having match up IDs (which are generated) that jump all over the place, we go through and re-assign them, so they are in order. For a 64 team tourney, round 1 will be MatchUp1 through MatchUp32, Round 2 will be MatchUp33 through MatchUp48, etc. Then we use the assignment order for the first round to determine where the team slots are, but teams are put into the slot in order also - so when you bind up to the TBC, you can order your teams in such a way that you can determine the initial match ups fairly easily.

So, how does all this work in a double elimination bracket? Good try. I've got it worked out, but because we wanted to get it released, we pulled it out. We'll finish that up this summer, and then I'll talk about how double elimination brackets are created and teams are assigned.

NCAA Tournament Pools Are Legal In Vermont

Joel Ross — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 03:19:00 GMT

One of the things we struggled with when we first started the Tourney Pool Manager was the gambling aspect. We include a money mode, but with a disclaimer saying that if you use that for gambling, you accept all risk.

Why do we even include that? Well, it's not illegal everywhere. If you're in Vermont, it actually is legal. They've made an exception to gambling for March Madness office pools! I guess they figured it'd be too hard to enforce anyway...

Technorati Tags: March+Madness | Office+Pools | Vermont

Tourneytopia.com Updates

Joel Ross — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:14:00 GMT

Since we announced the launch of Tourneytopia.com, we've still been very busy tidying things up. We've done builds just about every night since then, and sometimes first thing in the morning if we found a critical issue.

Well, I'm hoping that will slow down now. When we launched, we still had a few minor issues and features we wanted to get done, and tonight, I feel like we've got them all done. Don't get me wrong, there's still things we want to do. But most of that relates to either brand new features or changes to the current features to make it support more than just March Madness. So, given how busy we've been, we've decided to shelve any new features until next year, and put off making it more generic until April.

So, what does that mean? It means we're now feature complete for 2006! I listed out the major new features a while ago, but here's what we've added recently:

Improved What-If Scenarios: First, what we need to answer exactly what "What-If Scenarios" are. Once the tourney gets to the final four, the scenarios become active. Last year, all we did was show them for that week between the final four being set and when the first final four game was finished. After that, it was disabled again. This year, we still show them, and incorporate the actual results into the scenarios - so you track as the final four and championship games complete which scenarios are still valid, but also see what could have been. By the way, I always fall into the "what could have been" category - there's usually a scenario where I can finish in second or third, but it never comes to pass.
Licensing can be purchased directly from Tourneytopia.com. You can initialize a purchase directly from the Tourneytopia.com. We aren't completely automated - we still have to add your license once we are notified, but by this weekend, we are hoping to have it completely automated. The good news (if you want to look at it that way!) is that most people don't make their purchase until the week before the tourney starts or the week of the tourney so it shouldn't affect too many people (although, orders are starting to come in!).
We made a change in how we handle unlicensed entries. Before, if an entry came in and it took you over the number of entries you had licenses for, then that entry was saved, but not visible on the site. That can get confusing for users who don't (and shouldn't have to) know anything about how it's licensed. They wonder what happened to their entry. Well, now they'll be able to find their entry. It just won't be scored or ranked. But users can still see it, and edit it before the tourney starts.
We also have made quite a few minor UI improvements, including some basic formatting of grids, removal of an unneeded page, and a few others. Nothing major here, but the changes give it a better feel.

So what's coming from Tourneytopia.com? Not much new over the next few weeks. Our focus now is sales and support, and we'll fix bugs as we find them. Then, it'll be time for March Madness - my favorite time of the year!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Pools | Pool+Manager | NCAA

Congrats to pwarner!

Joel Ross — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:24:00 GMT

Congratulations to pwarner for winning the Second Annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest. He (yes, I know for sure that pwarner is a male) gained the most points throughout the tournament. We'll be sending out his $25 Best Buy gift certificate soon!

While pwarner won it all, everyone who entered helped us out tremendously, and I want to thank everyone for that! We were able to find quite a few bugs and squash all of them. Fortunately, none of those issues involved any type of data loss - the one that confused a lot of people was the bracket change that happened at the last minute - the 12th overall person dropped out of the tourney due to a back injury, and numbers 64 through 13 all moved up one slot, throwing the whole bracket out of whack. Luckily, we have a way to edit the bracket, so anyone who was able to get back into their bracket could fix it up. Not that i tprobably made much of a difference - the seeding of this tourney is much less of a factor than it tends to be in March Madness. Anyone can beat just about anyone!

Technorati Tags: World+Golf+Championship

Tourneytopia.com

Joel Ross — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 02:46:00 GMT

A few nights ago, we launched Tourneytopia.com. If you watched closely last week, you might have noticed that the Tourney Logic Match Play Contest was hosted on Tourneytopia. Well, that was a pre-release, and the main site still just redirected to Tourney Logic's website.

But no more! Tourneytopia.com is your place to go for your pool needs. We provide the hosting, but it's completely customizable for your needs! We've added a ton of new things this year, and we're extremely excited to get this rolling!

So what's new? Glad you asked:

All new look and feel. We're almost finalized, and I think it looks very good - a clean, uncluttered interface. We're still working with our design team to finalize the look and feel, but even without that, the pool looks good!
Edit your picks! Every year, people ask if they can change their picks ("What was I thinking picking Southwestern College of Indiana over Duke!?!?"), and until this year, we had to say no. Now, right up until games start, you can change your picks. And yes, I know, SWCI is not a real school. And if they were, no one would pick them over Duke!
Private labeling: March Madness is huge, right? Everyone gets involved. If you're a business, why not make a promotion out of it? For a solid month, you'll get poeple coming to your pool all the time to see how they are doing. That's awesome exposure for your company! Not only that, but this year, we've come up with an easy way to include sponsors, so get a few sponsors for your pool's prizes, and they get the same exposure you do!
Easy management. Once you get it set up (we'll talk about that in a minute), that's it. The pool is self-updating. We provide the results - there's no data entry on your part!
What-If Scenarios. Ok. So the tourney is down to the final four. All week, you're wondering if you're going to win the pool. How do you normally figure it out? "I picked Duke, and if they win, I get 11 points. Steve didn't, and I'm behind Steve by 3 points. I'll beat him. But what about Mark, or Jim, or..." Well, no more. We show you the 8 possible scenarios, and who'll win each one! We had this feature last year, but it was an add-on after the tourney started.
Your data is your data. We collect information about every user - and you can even define what extra information you want to collect - but we don't do anything with the info. But the data is yours. You can see reports and export them to a PDF file or to an Excel spreadsheet. Do you run a contest and your legal department says you have to have a record of every user's picks? No problem. That data is available too, with the same export options.
Scoring options: We've revamped the scoring a lot. Want to reward people for picking upsets in the first round? Well, first give the round a value. Then, you can have the seed added or multiplied by that value. Don't want that bonus in the fourth round? Then for round four, set it to No Bonus. Each round can be scored completely different - and that What-If stuff I talked about? It's based on your scoring method!

So the pool's pretty feature rich, but it has to be a pain to set up, right? Wrong! We've made it extremely simple to get started. You simply register (we need you to have a user account so you be the first administrator), pick a Pool Id and a Title for your pool, and you're done. If you want to be. If you don't want to be done, you can change the default messages and scoring, but you don't have to.

So, what are you waiting for? March Madness is right around the corner!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Tourney+Logic | NCAA | March+Madness | Pool

2nd Annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest - Your Chance To Win!

Joel Ross — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:47:00 GMT

Tourney Logic is pleased to announce the launch of the 2nd Annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest. As if that wasn't exciting enough, if you win you'll get a $25 Best Buy gift card!

The Accenture Match Play tournament starts February 22nd. Tee offs usually start around 7:30 AM, so we'll stop taking entries on early that morning. Feel free to enter as many times as you want!

Last year was a slight let down - there were so many upsets that no one even had a chance by the time we got to the final four - it was over already! Hopefully this year will be a little more competitive.

Now, remember, this is a beta test for us. We will do our best to keep the site up and running, but if we see bugs, we will be fixing them. Depending on the severity of the bug, we'll be releasing fixes. If it's not a severe error, we'll wait until later at night. But, if it is major, we may have to push it out right away - and if you have data loss because of that, I'm sorry ahead of time!

Now, there is a chance that someone will pull out - they have until the 20th at 5:00 PM - but it's not expected to happen. In the even that it does, we'll just draw a winner from all of the entries. Otherwise, it's whoever knows their golf the best (or, most likely, gets the luckiest!).

By the way, here's a link to last year's pool.

Technorati Tags: Golf | Tournament | Pool | Accenture+Match+Play

Tourney Pool Manager 2006 - A Quick Update

Joel Ross — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 22:46:00 GMT

Now that the Tourney Bracket Control is out the door, I've shifted my focus to the Tourney Pool Manager.

We have a pretty good idea of exactly what we want to do, but there are a few things still up in the air. Anyway, we do have a few obvious things we're doing. Let's list out the new features we've settled on:

We're implementing the new Tourney Bracket Control. As a part of that, we upgraded to ASP.NET 2.0.
New scoring options. Last year, we added a "underdog" mode - where the TPM would multiply the round's value by the seed. Or you could just go with the round's value. This year, it's much, much more flexible. For each round, you can assign a round value, and then a seeding bonus. You can select to multiply by seed, or you can add the seed. Each round can be different! Ultimate flexibility!
On the heels of the new scoring, we're also going to change the way our scoring engine saves results. Before, it was stored in the database, based on your licenses. We had some issues with that if the site was accessible from an alternate URL - the results could get calculated for a URL you didn't license, resulting in only 5 entries being scored, even if you bought 100 licenses. This year, the scoring is cached in memory by URL, so as long as you are coming from the valid URL, you'll see all results.
A new design. Much nicer! And more flexible. We're using ASP.NET's Themes, so you can just create your own skin, and point the Tourney Pool Manager to use the new skin.
A user page - yes, this means multiple entries per user! You can register once, and submit as many brackets as you want, and track them all in one place - a "Me" page.
Edit your bracket - Not quite as sure about picking IUPUI to the Final Four? Now you can edit your picks up until the first game starts. We've had numerous requests for this one!
RSS for standings. You have to have RSS, right?
Better administration. Upload your custom header directly from the software. An HTML editor for the email message, confirmation message, and the homepage message.

Interested? Want to give it a test run? Well, starting next week, we're running a beta for the Accenture Match Play golf tournament that starts on February 20th. We did this last year, and we are going to repeat it this year, as it went over very well. It gives us a great idea of how things are going for us, because the tournament is a 64 golfer tournament. Sound familiar? Once I get it up and running (we're to a point where it could be put out there), I'll post about it, and we'll get it on the web site. We're still determining what the prize will be, but we're hoping to offer something again this year.

Technorati Tags: Tourney+Pool+Mananger | NCAA | March+Madness | Basketball

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 And XHTML

Joel Ross — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 01:39:00 GMT

I'm in the process of upgrading the Tourney Pool Manager to .NET 2.0, and ran into an interesting issue with the Tourney Bracket Control. We struggled to figure out what was going on - it was not displaying correctly. The farther you got down in the NCAA bracket, the less aligned it was.

But we knew it could work, because we have it working just fine in our Quickstarts. So I started comparing how the output was different there compared to the page in the TPM. I eliminated the output from the bracket because it was the same. Removing content around the bracket didn't help either.

Then, I tried one other thing: I noticed that in ASP.NET 2.0, the default head tag has an XML namespace in it. So I copied that and the doc type tags over, and suddenly, the rendering worked in the TPM. Even with adding in all of the surrounding content. So I looked at what was different, and it turns out that the upgraded TPM pages had a doc type of HTML 4.0, while newly added pages in Visual Studio 2005 have a doc type of XHTML 1.0 (transitional). That's the difference!

We use a lot of CSS and styles for our rendering now - something we didn't do in TBC 1.0. One of the side effects of that is that we now require XHTML rendering to be used.

And in case you were wondering, using XHTML rendering also allows it to display and work correctly in Firefox, something TBC 1.0 didn't do - it worked, but didn't display the lines correctly. Now, it looks the same in IE and Firefox.

Technorati Tags: Tourney+Bracket+Control | XHTML | DOCTYPE

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 Released

Joel Ross — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:04:00 GMT

I remember sitting on a flight from Detroit to Orlando next to Brian back in June. Well, I sort of remember it. I had been up all night at the hospital with our two month old, who had come down with something. She had a temperature, and with very young kids (less than three months old), that can be very serious. It turns out it wasn't serious, but still not something you mess around with.

Anyway, on the flight, our plan was to talk about how we could simplify the Tourney Bracket Control. We'd already decided that the "1.0 way" wasn't the best we could do and an easier way would be to generate rounds and games based purely on the number of competitors. Now, all we had to do was figure out how to do that! So we spent part of the flight talking about it. And by the time we were done talking, we figured out the logical algorithm to take the number of teams and figure out how many rounds and games you'd need. We even figured out how to determine where the bye games should go.

Then I slept.

We then spent a week at Tech Ed learning about .NET 2.0 and the newly planned features there. We decided the best course for the Tourney Bracket Control would be to make it a .NET 2.0 control. It would be a great learning experience with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, and it would ensure that our software was on the latest and greatest platform.

On the way back, we formulated a plan to conquer it. I mocked up a CSS-based bracket layout (which was later partially abandoned) while Brian worked on coding the algorithm.

Fast forward seven months. We're done! We've both been working nights and weekends to get this out, and we're very happy with how things turned out. I'll go into more technical details in posts to come, but for now, it's out there.

So what made it in the final version?

It's just plain easier!: This is the big one! You no longer have to worry about how the bracket should look. Or plan out your groups, rounds and match ups. You just tell it how many teams you want, and it builds the bracket for you.
CSS-based layout: We used to use a table approach, and while tables are still involved, it's not nearly as much as before. There's a few side effects of this change: First, the bracket no longer natively supports nice coloring and filling of rounds with specific colors. Before, you could specify a group or round to have a certain appearance, and that's no longer supported. Why did we think that was acceptable? Because, using your own CSS, you'll be able to go in and create any type of coloring you want (see the advanced styling sample for a look at what's possible now).
Databinding: We wanted to do this with 1.0, but never got around to it. With 2.0, you can now take a collection of competitors, and bind it to the Tourney Bracket Control. The Tourney Bracket Control will then use those teams to create the layout.
Pricing: We now have a professional licensing system instead of our homegrown system we were using. There are many benefits to the new licensing. First, because we can create all kinds of different limits, we are able to offer it to hobbiests for a very reasonable price - pricing starts at $19.99. But, it's flexible enough that it can also handle large installations easily too. The other benefit (and this is for both Tourney Logic and you!) is that licensing is automatic. Before, it required human intervention, and you were gauranteed a license within 48 hours. Now, once we receive confirmation of payment, you'll get an email with the licensing instructions included! I'm being intentionally vague here. It will either be attached or as a download. I'm not working on that part, so I'm not sure.
And more: There are a ton of other new things in this. It's basically almost a complete rewrite, and we fixed everything that we didn't like about the original. It renders faster. It self-validates results. It can even make toast! Ok. No toast. But there's a lot there that's new!

We are missing one glaring feature: double elimination. It's something that everyone's been clamoring for, and it's coming! We're actually very, very close. I had it almost working (the end of the tourney was giving me a hard time - when the losing and winning brackets come back together), but we ran out of time. We backed out those features and solidified the Tourney Bracket Control for release. Double elimination is coming, I promise. But not until this summer.

What timeframe did we run up against? The Tourney Pool Manager. We need to get that upgraded to the new Tourney Bracket Control and get that ready to go. March Madness isn't that far away!

Anyway, after a lot of hard work, it's out! Go download it now - there's a 30 day trial!

Technorati Tags: Tourney+Logic | Tourney+Bracket+Control | server+controls | aspnet

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 Update

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:34:00 GMT

We are still working on the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0. The beta license has just been updated to 3/1/2006. Download the updated Bracket Quickstart Tutorial again to get the updated license.

We have been slowed down with this release working on double elimination. It is coming along and we actually have it figured out but the testing is taking way longer then we expected. Due to the time constraints of trying to get it done and our need to get Tourney Pool Manager ready to go for March Madness 2006 we have decided to postpone the double elimination until after March Madness as part of Tourney Bracket Control 3.0. We plan to finish the final testing on Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 without double elimination and release it sometime in January.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 - In Beta!

Joel Ross — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:10:00 GMT

Well, we finalized the last few things that we needed to get the Beta out of the Tourney Bracket Control, and over the weekend, Brian posted the source to the Quickstarts that we put up last week. So if you watched the video, you can now download the code, and play with it for yourself, instead of watching us mess around with it!

Here's Brian's announcement, and here's a link to download the quick starts. And in case you haven't seen it yet, here are the videos where we demo some of the features.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Source Code Available

Brian Anderson — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:30:00 GMT

The source code is now available for the TBC 2.0 (Beta). The QuickStart tutotrial and the TBC 2.0 are written in ASP.NET 2.0. We recommending using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express / SQL Express (Note: the express products are free until 11/8/2006!!).

View the live Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Tutorial.

Download the TBC 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Source Code.

Learn more about the upcoming TBC 2.0 release.

TBC 2.0 Licensing Note: We are still working through the licensing details but at this point we are leaning towards having one option that will cost less than $50! Stay tuned for more information.