Tourney Pool Manager

March Madness 2006 Is Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:59:00 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

NCAA Tournament Pools Are Legal In Vermont

Joel Ross — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:19:00 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

Joel Ross — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 21:46:00 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 12:47:00 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 Bracket Control 2.0 And XHTML

Joel Ross — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 20:39:00 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 Pool Manager: New Features

Joel Ross — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:20:00 GMT

Last week, we ran across a few issues with the Tourney Pool Manager, mainly related to how it downloaded results from our website. We issued a patch on Thursday night, and sent a notice out to our customers. Friday through Sunday seemed to run rather smoothly.

While I was in the hopital with my wife, I had nothing better to do than add features to the Tourney Pool Manager while I watched the games. You may not have noticed, but when I posted my bracket, you saw one of the features we added. Go take a look at Kansas. It's crossed out all the way to the Final Four, even though those games aren't complete yet.

The other feature we added is a scenario generator. Once the Final Four games are set (after next Sunday), you'll be able to look in the Tourney Pool Manager and see the eight possible outcomes, and what the standings will look like for that scenario. Now, you'll know how the Final Four has to shake out for you to win your office pool! Thanks for this needs to go to Jerry over at TalkNCAA and TalkHeels. He helped out with a lot of the legwork on this one.

We're currently beta testing on our own servers, and are targetting tomorrow night to release. That way, you'll have all day Wednesday to get it installed.