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NFLPOOL 1 version 2.05 NFLPOOL A Pool Management Tool for the NFL Regular Season by Tom Cunningham 1 Introduction. Organizing a pool for the NFL is always a lot more work than it first appears. Every week you have to distribute a schedule to the pool participants, which is easy enough, but then Tuesday you have to score everyone's selection and add that to everyone's previous results, and somewhere in the middle of the season the total amount of paper on hand starts to get very, very large. Simply compiling the standings can take quite a bit of time, if everything goes well. If you make any mistakes, you can forget about lunch that day... NFLPOOL was designed to eliminate these sorts of hassles. NFLPOOL was created specifically to manage office pools for NFL season. Pool participants tell you who they think will win each week's games, and NFLPOOL does the rest. Results are cumulatively tabulated automatically and potential mistakes are minimized. NFLPOOL takes the hassles out of managing your NFL pool. 2 Licensing Agreement. NFLPOOL has taken many hours to program and debug. It is copyrighted software and it is not in the public domain. It is distributed under the Shareware concept. You may try out the program and distribute it freely (so long as both the program and this documentation file are distributed together). You have a limited license to use NFLPOOL on a purely trial basis. If you continue to use NFLPOOL you must register it by sending a check for $20 to: NFLPOOL 2 version 2.05 Tom Cunningham P.O. Box 3015 Atlanta, GA 30301 When you register, you gain the right to continue to use this software. In addition, if you are not registering the latest version of NFLPOOL, I will send it to you. All registered users will receive the next update, as well. Additional updates will be made available at nominal cost. 3 Legal Disclaimer. This software is provided strictly on an "as is" basis. I make no warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, any warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for any particular purpose. I shall not be liable for any damages, whether direct, indirect, special or consequential, arising from failure of the product to operate in the manner desired by the user. I shall not be liable for any damage to data or property which may be caused directly or indirectly by the use of this product. I shall not be liable to the user for any damages including, but not limited to, any lost profits, lost savings, or other incidental or consequential damages arising out of your use of, or inability to use, the product, or for any claim by any other party. NFLPOOL 3 version 2.05 4 Registration. To register additional copies of NFLPOOL fill in the information on this page and send it in. Registration supports continued development of the product, and gives you the right to continue its use. As a further inducement, when I receive your registration I will send you the current version of NFLPOOL if you are not already using it, and all registered users will receive the next update as well, if and when it becomes available, and further updates will be available at nominal cost, so that there is substantial advantage in registration. THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT! ____ I would like to register NFLPOOL. I enclose a check for $20. ____ I would like to register my use of NFLPOOL and NCAAPOOL (described below). I enclose a check of $29 (normal registration of both would be $40). Send checks to: Tom Cunningham P.O. Box 3015 Atlanta, GA 30301-3015 NAME: _____________________________________________________ ADDRESS: __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ COMPUTER: _________________________________________________ WHERE DID YOU GET THIS PROGRAM: ___________________________ DISK SIZE: 5.25" 3.5" COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS: NFLPOOL 4 version 2.05 5 Running NFLPOOL. To start NFLPOOL, simply copy the program NFLPOOL.EXE onto the disk or directory you intend to use (it is never a good idea to work from your original disk. Always work with a copy). Make sure the logged directory corresponds to the location of the program (i.e., if you are running the program from the A: disk drive, make sure you have the program on the disk in A: and have an A> prompt, or put the program in, say, C:\NFLPOOL, and change to that directory), and type NFLPOOL. The program takes it from there. If this is the first time you have run NFLPOOL, the program will look for some necessary files and when it doesn't find them, will ask you if it is OK to create them (answer Y unless you want to change something before you begin). When you restart NFLPOOL, it will immediately find the files, and you will not see the message again. When you start NFLPOOL, you get a menu with 5 choices: entering schedule data, entering player choice data, printing a week's schedule, entering game results, and getting the pool results. 5.1 Schedule data. Entering schedule data is easy. NFLPOOL asks you which week of the season you wish to enter. There is no need to enter the game schedule in any particular order. For example, you can start with week 8, then later add week 10, or week 1 or whatever. Thus you can start pools in the middle of the season, or do the whole season at once, or anything combination or permutation you want. NFLPOOL gives you an alphabetical list of the NFL teams, and you select the appropriate game pairs by number. NFLPOOL repeats the week's choices when you are finished to give you a chance to change things if you make a mistake. There are now BYE weeks in the schedule. Simply select BYE 1, 2, . . . through 6 for the opponents for the teams that have the week off. (If there are no teams off, simply have BYEs "play" against each other, e.g., BYE 1 against BYE 2.) NFLPOOL runs off the schedule data, so you need to enter schedule data before you do other things, but if you haven't entered the data, NFLPOOL will let you know. NFLPOOL 5 version 2.05 5.2 Entering participants' choices. The first thing NFLPOOL does when you ask it to enter participant's choices is tell you how many participants you currently have in your pool, and ask if you want to add more. The first time you run NFLPOOL, of course, there are no participants records at all, so you must add more! Each participant is given their own file, which this section of the program sets up. It is a good idea to set up everyone's files at once, but not necessary since you can add more later, and edit later, too. See below. (The unregistered version of NFLPOOL has a maximum number of participants set at 15. The registered version of NFLPOOL has a maximum of 300 participants. If you have more participants than this, let me know, as there is an easy way to run multiple pools without much additional hassle.) Once you've established the number of pool participants, NFLPOOL asks you which week of the season for which you wish to enter choices. Generally, I would think this would correspond to the current week. For example, if this is the second week of the season, you would enter 2. You can, however, select any week. If you have not entered schedule data for that week, NFLPOOL will tell you, and bring you back to the main menu. Since the schedule for that week is already entered, entering the choices of the participants is easy! NFLPOOL give you the contestants' names and the teams in the game and asks you who the contestant picked. You simply enter the choices from the menu. Teams that have a bye will appear in the selection process. You need to enter a choice, but the choice does not matter, as teams with a bye are not counted in the result tabulation. If you have added participants (or made a mistake earlier), you may want to enter choices for a week that you've already done for everyone else. No problem. Simply select the week you wish to work on, and if selections are already present for a participant, NFLPOOL will ask if you wish to write over them. If you've made a mistake, answer yes (this is how you can edit an individual's choices if you make a mistake entering them), otherwise answer no. NFLPOOL will examine all the players' choices for that week, asking the same question. If NFLPOOL finds no choices entered for a participant, it automatically goes to through the schedule for that week. Thus, adding new members' choices is a breeze! You just pick the week you want and when NFLPOOL gets to the participants whose choices you haven't entered, it goes through the entering routine. NFLPOOL 6 version 2.05 5.3 Printing a Week's Schedule. If you want NFLPOOL to print a week's schedule, select this option. NFLPOOL will ask which week you want printed, and then print it. If you haven't entered schedule data for the week, you will simply get a page of "NFLPOOL versus NFLPOOL" rather than team names. 5.4 Entering game results. After the the games are played, you select this option and NFLPOOL asks you who won the scheduled games (again, if you didn't enter the schedule for the week, you will be sent back to the main menu). The results of teams with a bye must be entered, but, again, these results are not counted in tabulating results. 5.5 Getting the results. When you select this option, NFLPOOL asks if you would like results for a particular week, or the entire season. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you answer that you would like a particular week, NFLPOOL asks which one. In either case NFLPOOL then asks if you would like individual results printed. If you answer yes, NFLPOOL compares the weekly selections made by the participants against the game results (if there are no results for the week, NFLPOOL reports this). It then prints the choice made and the outcome of the game. Finally, it reports the number of correct choices made. It is at this point that NFLPOOL actually does the tabulation, so if you have a large number of participants, the disk drive may be running for quite some time. Running NFLPOOL on a hard disk is a good idea if you have a lot of people involved, but even then it may still be a couple of minutes to complete the tabulation. Even if you do not want individual results printed, the tabulation may take some time. Next, NFLPOOL asks how you would like overall results: just on the screen, just the printer, or both. This is a tally of the overall pool, showing the number of correct choices everyone has made. (This is the whole point of the pool!) This can be printed, or displayed on the screen, or both. 5.6 Resetting NFLPOOL for another tournament. To re-use NFLPOOL for another tournament, simply erase the files all the files beginning with NFLPOOL except for NFLPOOL.exe and NFLPOOL.doc. NFLPOOL 7 version 2.05 6 A Plug for NCAAPOOL. If you've ever organized a pool on the NCAA basketball tournament, you know what a hassle it can be. First the easy part: You make a lot of copies of the tournament tree from the newspaper and distribute them and get everyone to fill them out and returned to you in time. Then the REAL hassles start: Every round you have to check a couple of dozen of these sheets and tabulate the results in some sort of meaningful way. You give out the results and everyone wants to know why they aren't winning. You have to spend a couple of hours compiling detailed individual statistics for each round to keep everyone satisfied. It's a hassle. NCAAPOOL was created to eliminate that hassle. NCAAPOOL was created to manage office pools for the annual NCAA basketball tournament. Pool participants would fill out the tournament tree found in any newspaper's sports section, selecting who they think would win each game and each resulting game between winners in previous rounds until the final tournament winner emerged. There are currently 64 teams that start the single-elimination tournament, so 63 games over the span of 6 rounds, taking about two weeks, need to be played to determine the ultimate winner. The problem is that the pool participants want to know how they are doing as the tournament progresses, and taking out their choice sheets and marking them against the progress of the tournament is a time-consuming pain. The problem gets worse when different participants use different newspapers to get their tournament tree setups, so there are different forms that slow the tallying process and encourage mistakes. Out of this came NCAAPOOL. Once the basic first-round team structure is entered, everything is automatic. The pool participants' choices are easy to enter even if they are using different basic forms (since the underlying structure of the tournament is set by the first-round pairings which NCAAPOOL tracks automatically). The results of the tournament can be entered on a round-by-round basis, and reports for both individuals and the overall pool generated as you desire. NCAAPOOL takes the hassle (and a good many of the potential mistakes) out of organizing a pool. Normally NCAAPOOL registration is $20, but if you register NFLPOOL and NCAAPOOL together, the fee is $29, a savings of 27% on both. Thank you for using and supporting NFLPOOL with your registration!