Welcome to the 10th Annual Erensen Hockey Pool!

The website is live: www.erensen.com/hockeypool2004    

Instructions and Further Information: It is once again time for the annual playoff hockey pool.

The format of the pool is going to be the same as last year. The pool will cover the four rounds of the playoffs and in order to do so everyone involved will need to pick the next round of playoff games as the match-ups are determined.  The only exception is for the Stanley Cup Finals which will be picked at the same time as the conference finals. 

Here is how the pool works:

For each round, all I need from you is to pick the winner in each series, the number of games that you think they are going to win in, and for a tie-breaker, the total number of goals that you think will be scored in the first round (more about this later).  

These are best of seven series so you need to let me know whether you think the teams that you pick are going to win in 4, 5, 6, or 7 games.  For each winning team you pick correctly you will get four points, but a point will be taken away for each game you are off in the number of games that you predicted they would win. If you call a series exactly you will receive 1 additional bonus point.  For example, if you picked Boston to win in four games and they did, you would receive five points (4 for picking the correct team + 1 bonus point for calling it exactly). If you picked them to win in seven and they actually won in four then you would receive only one point:

          4 points - 3 games off = 1 point remaining.

If you do not pick the correct winner of the series you are not rewarded any points.  In the second round, for each series picked correctly you will receive five points, once again having a point deducted for each game that you are off by.  In the conference finals, you will receive six points for each series picked correctly and in the Stanley Cup, you will receive seven points if you pick the correct team.  In each round there will be a bonus of one point for each series that is called exactly. This is to encourage participants to call series in 4 and 7 games.

In order to make the first two even more important a certain number of participants, depending on the number of entries, will be dropped. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 percent of the total participants will be dropped after each round based on their current standing in the pool. We will be able to determine the exact number of people to be dropped each round once we know how many people are going to participate.

In order to break up a tie for any of the rounds, I am asking that you submit a guess for the total number of goals scored in each of the rounds. So, in the first round if you think that there is going to be an average of 7 goals a game, and five games a series, and there are 8 different series, then your guess for the total number of goals could be:

                       7 X 5 X 8 = 280

This will be used as a tie-breaker for the participants getting dropped after each round as well as for determining a winner for each round. So, to become a participant, you need to send me your picks including the number of games, for each of the 8 first round series and the total number of goals that you think will be scored in the first round.  You also need to send me your prediction for the Stanley Cup winner.