2018 National Football League Pools

Well folks. As Hammer Archer will have the hands full for the foreseeable, I've taken on the mantle regarding running the pools for the upcoming National Football League. The rules are the same as previous pools, see below;


1. Each Monday I will post up the fixtures for the coming week and by Tuesday or Wednesday I should have the league table of posters and points for the previous week just gone.

2. Latecomers will be accepted but points will be forfeited for any games missed.

3. Predictions will be accepted and valid by throw-in time of the first game of the weekend. The first game this season is at 1pm on January 27th. Any predictions for this game made after this time will not count (but any predictions made for other games not yet started will still count).

4. The points system I am using is similar to that used in the League and Championship pools of previous seasons.
You get 2 points for predicting the winner of the game. Should a poster predict within 2 points of the winning margin, that poster will receive 1 bonus point.
Should a poster correctly predict a draw, the poster will receive 3 points.
Where a poster predicts a team to win but the result is a draw, the poster will get 1 point ONLY if the poster has predicted a winning margin of no more than 1 point.
I'll award one point if a person predicts a draw yet the result is a one point win for either side.
Needless to say if you predict a team to win and they lose you get no points.

5. Bonus points will be awarded at the end of the league for predicting the correct teams who get promoted and relegated respectively. More points will be available on prediction of the winner of the league finals. You get 2 points for each correct prediction for promotion, relegation and League Champion.
Note: to those joining after the first set of fixtures are finished, these bonus point predictions can still be made, but a 25% penalty for each week missed will apply.

6. Posters must predict promotions/relegations in their first post with their first round of predictions. I will provide the league tables to aid in decision making.

7. To cut out a lot of time, if posters consistently fail to post their weekly predictions, I'll remove them from the overall tables.

8. If a poster makes two (or more) predictions for the same game week, the latest of these sets of predictions will count regardless of the score of each set.

As I said, I'll aim to have the table from the previous weekend's fixtures up by the middle of each week.