Bracket contests have been opened for the NBA and NHL playoffs.

The playoffs are enarly over, so you only have to look at past results to know who to pick for most of them, but I wanted to test this since I worked so long making these.

So you will automatically come out ahead in points. I put low values since we knows most results already.

Simply click the "Betting" link under the logo at the top of any page and then scroll down near the bottom of the front sports betting page. there you will see the two contests which each say "In Progress" for their status.

For each one click the name, on the next page click the link to fill out a bracket, then go through ALL of the steps to make your selections.

One new feature I added is the tie breaker questions. Enter your numbers for those in case there is a tie. If everyone who ties then ties again on the tie breaker it will split the pot between them.

I already added my picks and it seems to have added everything properly. I ran into tons of issues with the hockey bracket because the winners of the first round DO NOT play a specific game's winner. They are RE-seeded for that second round! So I had to rush through and change the setup to make the matchups go through the process properly.

Note: Since point totals are not shown in topics right now, if you want to see your point total click the "My Stats" link in the betting system. That will show your various point totals.

Thanks

lmao Aaron, we even picked the same picks for unfinished series so my tie breaker feature is going to immediately come into play. We both picked different tie breakers so that's cool.

I may open them up for people to join again after paying out some rounds, but it's kind of pointless because the only way they could beat us would be to pick a different champ.

I almost picked Cleveland to win the whole NBA one so luckily I changed my mind or you would have a chance to win it outright.

Congratulations to Guy Guyerson for winning the NHL Playoff Contest.

This was the first contest to use the tie breaker feature.

We both had perfect brackets (of course we knew who won all but the final series when we made our selections), but Aaron won the tie breaker. His tie breaker answer was off by 2 and mine was off by 4.

I have it set up to only give the final winner the perfect bracket bonus. Even though I technically did get a perfect bracket also. I am open to feedback on that for the future. I'm not sure how other companies do in the case that there may be two perfect brackets on a game that offers a bonus for perfect brackets.

I am also still trying to decide for the future whether you should get full credit for a correct pick if they did not play in the proper matchup. I am tending to agree with Aaron that it should be paid out regardless of who you had them playing. In a traditional NCAA bracket you don't have to be correct on both winners obviously.

So for the future I probably need to edit the NFL and NHL bracket setups to allow for this.

It took me hours to pay this contest out because I was seeing errors throughout the process. I had to keep fixing bugs until I finally got it to pay properly. I checked and it gave me and Aaron both the correct point totals we earned for this contest.

This contest did not give many points though. I probably should toss Aaron some extra points just for helping me out.

I am not paying out the NBA contest for any rounds yet because I spent so long fixing bugs for this one. I think all the bugs from this one were ones I fixed in the NBA one. So the NBA contest SHOULD pay out perfectly. However I am going to test another feature on the admin side when paying that one out so I need to take my time when I do it and double check whether or not it properly updates the appropriate rows.

I paid out the NBA contest up to the current point in the playoffs. The point totals are paid out correctly.

I tested my "per update" setting where it will only update x rows at a time and then redirect to itself and update the rest. I tested by using 1 for the setting and it did apparently pay out 1 at a time. It put the proper winners in the DB so it apparently also redirected with all of the necessary information in tact.

The only bug I noticed was that if I paid out rows out of sequence then it would mess everything up. It would mess up the decision on which rows still needed to be paid and it also would mess thigns up by setting it to the next round before the round ended if you happen to pay out the final row of a round before the rest are complete.

Luckily I just randomly did what it took to cause that bug or I may have not even noticed.

So now everything is fixed and both contests seem fine.

Congrats to Guy Guyerson for winning the NBA contest also. In both of these contests we tied and he won the tie breakers.

At some point I want to have it display everyone's tie breaker choices. As it currently is you must click their name to see them.

I think everything went well. I was trying to be sure how many rows it paid out at a time, but I accidentally had the wrong count display to me so I couldn't confirm it. I THINK it properly paid one and then the other rather than both at once though.