PYU Week 1 Results

Hello players! As promised, here is the old-style weekly results blog post. Remember the season is not broken into weeks anymore, so there's no need to wait for the Clemson-Duke game to play out.

The standings are at the main page, and there's a separate blog post explaining those in detail, so I won't repeat that here.

The biggest winner in Week 1 was eDogg, who had 3 parlay hits:

• 50 units on Stanford -3, Kansas -20.5 (at 2.058), won 196.450
• 25 units on Old Dominion/Virginia Tech over 48, Tulane -6.5 (at 2.058), won 98.225
• 15 units on UL Monroe +9, Houston -2, won 54.660

Before we go any further, I should explain how the parlay payouts work now. Previously, it was a flat 2.6 -to-1 for a two-way win and 6-to-1 for a three-way. Now, you can include money lines in parlays, and it's possible for point spread and over-under bets to pay other than 1.909 (-110). How is the payout determined?

In the new "decimal odds" or "European odds" system, you multiply the payouts for the two (or three) winnings bets to get the for the total parlay. Let's look at the UL Monroe/Houston parlay. Both pay 1.909, so the payoff is 1.909 x 1.909 which round to 3.644 (we go to three decimal places.) 15 x 3.644 is exactly 54.66. Bear in mind this includes the return of the original bet, where the old accounting didn't. So it now pays 2.644 to 1 instead of 2.6 to 1.

The other two parlay wins are a little different because one of the games had a higher payout. The Kansas and Tulane games paid better than usual, 2.058. 2.058 x 1.909 = 3.929, making the a parlay win a little more favorable. Money lines would be accounted for in the same way.

Other big wins were by BowlingNinjas, who nailed the Colorado outright win over TCU for 101.06 (20 x 5.053) and dsidwell, who leaned on Miami to cover against... er, Miami.

I won't be previewing the Week 2 games here, because the Play page will be constantly updated. It usually takes a day or two for odds to start trickling in, but the big games - and important games well into the season - have lines already, and you can play them whenever you want. You can already see next week's big games, because those tend to attract lines early.

Under the contest's new rules, there's no minimum requirements, so don't worry if you didn't play Week 1. You can jump in any time until October 15. Contests will close a little more than halfway through the regular season.

Other news items:

• You'll have to keep emailing picks for now, but I'm working on a way to make this a lot easier, until the full online submission is working. Trust me, it'll be worth it. Stand by for updates.
• I apologize that the website isn't as ready as it usually is. But there are reasons for this. The new website was a complete rebuild from scratch, with a lot of new features added. And, my ambitions have given me a mindset of "make it right", not just "make it work." The old protectyouru.net was held together with a lot of duct tape; I'm trying to actually fix problems now. And I find I often have to backtrack, to make an underlying function work better before I can do the greater thing I want.
• I have upgraded the site's aesthetics. You can see I'm going for kind of a Nintendo/retro arcade feel, with more modern looks where it makes sense. I'm pleased with it. I think it's showing a personality.
• You might have noticed it's all a little... cartoony. That's by design. I wanted to reframe the whole concept of online play-money sports gambling in a more lighthearted way, rather than duplicating it in form and function. I'm trying to keep the realism, but make the overall tone more playful.
• If you want to fine-tune your username, please let me know. Usernames can't have numbers for reasons I'll explain later, so if your name had a number in it I truncated it. I can also do a password reset. There will also be online pages for all of this, and more.
• Standings won't be final or count for anything until the end of the season, so don't be too discouraged if you have a bad rank at the moment, or too enthused if you have a good one.
• In moving to the new platform, I also dropped the line shopping system. Formerly, PYU offered the best -110 lines available. Now we collect data from over 25 different real-life sports books, and calculate our own consensus line from that. We also calculate a consensus payout, so some games will have better or worse payouts. These are indicated on the Play screen, next to the point spread/total, in a different font.
• I know there's a lot of minor layout problems right now, but that's the lowest priority on my bug list.
• You can download the raw data! Go to https://wajerleague.com/pyuoffers.php and you can see a JSON file of all the current offers, ready for easy importing into any tool. This is updated as the offers are. So if you're a spreadsheet guy, knock yourself out. There will also be JSON reports of other stuff you might want to know, likew 
• The picks page (now called "Play") has a single "last updated" message to tell you when the last update occurred. This applies to the entire page; there's no reason to maintain an update time for each individual bet like there used to be.
• I will no longer be a player in the contest. Since I'm sort of "going public" now, it could come off as a little untoward. Besides, I always wanted to be a game show host.
• And hey, anyone who wants to play can! I'm no longer making it difficult for non-USF fans, so invite your friends if you want to. Have them use the "contact" link to send me an email and I'll set them up.
• The login still doesn't do anything yet, but hold on to it, because it will soon.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, errors you spotted, please let me know! I appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and patience so far. I'll keep working to give you the best experience I can.