1. My "moneyless" pools are free to enter, and there is no cash prize. Winners will (at least in theory*) receive a small prize, such as a t-shirt, from CafePress or Zazzle, but the main object is to win bragging rights. One entry per person, please.
2. As an exception to the "one entry per person" rule, it is perfectly OK to enter a bracket "for" a pet, a baby or child, etc. (I do this myself!) However, such brackets should either be the contestant's genuine picks (e.g., my 2 and 4-year-olds make their own picks), or else based on some sort of fixed "system" (e.g., my cats "pick" all the teams with cat mascots). It shouldn't be an opportunity for you to just enter an extra bracket with a different version of your own picks.
3. All three pools are scored on a straight points-per-game basis, no "upset points" or anything like that. The point totals are as follows:
• Men's NCAA: scored on a 3-4-7-10-16-24-33 basis -- that is, 3 points per "First Four" game, 4 points per Round of 64 game, etc.
• Women's NCAA: scored on a 4-7-11-17-24-33 basis -- that is, 4 points per Round of 64 game, 7 points per Round of 32 game, etc.
• NIT: scored on a 7-10-15-20-25 basis.
4. (MEN'S NCAA POOL ONLY) The deadline to enter is Thursday, March 15 at noon Eastern Time. However, in the NCAA's infinite wisdom, there are four opening-round games Tuesday and Wednesday evenings (the "First Four"). If you enter BEFORE those games, you can earn points for picking them correctly. If you enter AFTER those games, you cannot earn any points for games already underway or completed, but you can pick all remaining games. (This is the so-called "Option 3" in my pool software.)
Meanwhile, in order to avoid penalizing contestants who enter "early" (i.e., before the First Four games), you will get credit in later rounds if you picked one First Four contestant to avdance, and instead the other one advances. So for instance, last year, people who picked USC to beat VCU in the First Four, and further picked USC to advance to the Final Four, got credit for VCU's run to the Final Four as if they had picked VCU. In essence, their bracket is treated (in subsequent rounds) as if they picked "VCU/USC." I explained this rule in even more excrucitating detail last year.
5. In each pool, the tiebreaker is the combined number of points scored by both teams in the championship game, but this is only used to determine who gets the CafePress/Zazzle prize; for all other purposes, any ties will remain unbroken. Contestants who finish tied for first place are considered "co-champions" for historical purposes.
6. I must have a valid e-mail address at which I can contact you. But don't worry -- your e-mail address will NOT be made public. And I won't spam you or sell your e-mail address or anything like that. I'm not an evil spam harvester or privacy-invading company. I'm just some guy with an NCAA pool. :)
7. Contestants are strongly encouraged to enter with their real names, first and last, in the "Your Name" field. Entries that anonymous, psuedonymous, first-name-only, Twitter-handle-only, etc., are not allowed -- at least not without discussing it with me first. Allow me to explain: I understand that people have legitimate concerns about privacy on the Internet. I realize there are valid reasons why some folks might not want to reveal their "real" names. However, I've been running these NCAA pools since 1996, when I was a freshman in high school, and it is traditionally a contest among "real people," not Internet personas. That's the reason for the "real name" rule. I am willing to make exceptions in specific circumstances, if a contestant has genuine privacy concerns, but I want to avoid anonymous/psuedonymous entries as much as possible. So again, please contact me in advance if this is an issue. You can e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com.
If you simply prefer not to have your name be easily "google-able," I suggest using a variation on your first name that you rarely or never use in real life -- for example, if I wanted to insulate a pool entry from easy "google-ability," I could enter as "Bren Loy" instead of "Brendan Loy." Such variations are acceptable under these rules. By contrast, "Brendan L." or "B. Loy" would NOT be acceptable (in large part because they make it very awkward to write pool updates on my blog and Twitter -- it's hard to write good headlines and articles about the pool when people with nicknames, initials, etc. are competing against people with full names).
In the event of an unsatisfactory self-identification, I will contact you via e-mail and try to come to a mutually satisfactory solution, but I reserve the right to disqualify people not in compliance with this rule.
If you have questions about any of the above, or if this rule poses a significant problem for you and you want to propose some sort of compromise solution, please e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com and let's talk about it. I truly want people to be able to participate in my pools, so I will try to be flexible and accommodate those who have genuine privacy concerns. But in my experience, people often avoid using their full names out of convenience or habit, rather than a strong stand on principle; it is this practice which I primarily want to discourage, lest my pool standings become a hodge-podge of meaningless nicknames. Also, my pool updates would sound rather silly if they began reading like: "B. takes lead over thebeef; Mc. third; some guy named David fourth, some other guy named David fifth." :) So I am trying to strike a balance here.
Again, I apologize if any of these rules sound harsh; please do e-mail me if they cause any problems for you in your particular situation. All private e-mail correspondences will be kept confidential.
8. With regard to the other fields on the entry form (school affiliations, where you live, etc.), I am much more flexible. I don't want to intrude on anyone's privacy; I just want to have some idea of who you are, and thus some reasonable way of identifying you in pool updates, whether that's "Josh Rubin, Newington High School Class of 1999 alum and 2002 Maryland graduate" or "Rick Boeckler, Becky's uncle and a resident of Silver Spring, MD." In other words, I don't need all of the information from everyone, but I need some information from everybody, so you aren't just an unknown name. And of course, the more information you're willing to give me, the better.
9. These rules are subject to change at my discretion if a mistake is discovered or an unexpected issue arises.
My apologies for the novel/lecture, but I wanted to be clear about all that. Now, let's get on with the pools!
* I mentioned that you get a t-shirt or other such prize "in theory." I say that because I am now, I believe, 3 full years behind in getting people their t-shirts. Yeah, I've been a little disorganized about this. LOL. I hope to get "caught up" this year, but I hoped that last year too and I never did. So, bottom line, don't enter the contest for the t-shirt; enter it for the ETERNAL GLORY!
