In 2012 I found myself in such a situation. I was playing with my friends to guess scores from Premier League. Till that time we kept an excel file with all the users, their scores and we had a special column to compute a total for all games in a stage (1 point for guessed prognostic and 3 points for exactly guessed score). That file was kept by one of us, sent by mail to all to complete scores, then sent back, and the admin user was updating the main file and so on. This process became soon a pain.
I started to create a web application to make it easier for all of us. Having an online web application with user security where users log and complete scores, then every computation is automatically done, was the right thing to do.
I did not want just a simple competition, like our Premier League. So I thought at it in a general manner. Administrator should be able to create a competition with a number of teams, stages and games, then a number of users will be registered to it. When a stage is approaching, users that did not complete it will be notified by mail to do so. In the day of the stage, application will inquire a site for live scores and, when finish, the scores will be automatically saved and a process of points computation will be run.
I chose as user scoring a simple algorithm to give 1 point for guessed prognostic, 3 points for guessed score when were at most 3 goals, n points for guessed score were n > 3 was the number of goals. This decision brings benefit to those that will guess a 2-2, 3-2 , or any score with more than 3 goals. To make it even more interesting, I created a section of questions for a competition. If user guesses a response he will be rewarded with 3 points. In time, another feature was added: a playoff. A competition can have a playoff phase. Starting from a defined stage, users will compete one against other and the user with a bigger scoring in that stage will advance to next round. The winner of the playoff will get a bonus of 10 points.
Using Java, Wicket and Spring I started to make this application happen. Spring Security helped to achieve users login/logout feature. When users are not logged , they can only see the real scores, but cannot see any data related to a user. When users are logged, they can see their scores, and after the stage started, they can see others scores.
Main screen is just a list of competitions (with Top3 aside) which by default shows only 4 of them. To look for other competitions, a search feature is used.
For small window sizes (like on mobile phones) the main screen is adjusted accordingly:
Admin user will be the only one that will see a toolbar inside main screen. From here, he can create users, competitions, teams, stages, games, questions. Also, admin can manually run the computation process , can reset top trends, can import a competition from a text file and can see the logins history.
By clicking a competition, a new screen will show all data for that competition:
At top, an auto-scroll banner will show the scores for last stage. User can see any stage from that competition and can enter scores for any stage that did not start yet. When the scores are automatically entered and after the computation process, user will see the number of points gained for every game and a total for that stage. User can also see how all other users performed. A Top section will show the total points for that competition with trend arrows (who climbed, who went down). There are a lot of other sections like the top of the real teams from that competition, the playoff, a rss feed to find news about that competition, statistics, graphics, questions.
Inside Statistics section, a general report for entire competition can be generated for every user. User can also see who was his lucky team because it brought him the most points. Also average points per stage top and the best stage scoring can be seen here:
Graphics can show user points evolution and some "awards" like who is the luckiest, who is the best at home games, who is the best at away games and who is the best at draw games.
All reports and charts were created and run using NextReports . I also made the code available on github.
There are more than 3 years from it's inception and many editions of Premier League, UEFA Champions League, World Cup, European Championship were finished. Competition fulfilled our needs: very easy to manage, to enter scores, notifications, auto computation processes. At the end all we need to do is to buy a cup for the winner and to celebrate him. Hurray!
