We’re currently addressing some issues with last week’s Weekly Leaderboard winner. We hope to announce the winner by tomorrow! Apologies and thanks for your patience.

Hockey is an extremely slippery slope in betting. Rarely can you find yourself making significant gains in hockey betting. But you can have some fun and make some headway with a few guidelines to help focus your betting and make the most of your bets.

Hockey games are tight and predicting them can be a nightmare because there are so many variables:

Officials – if they are calling a tight game, there may be a lot of power plays. This benefits the weaker teams, giving them a chance to hang in there with a more powerful team. Some teams are dynamite 5-on-5 at even strength, but struggle in the penalty kill or on the power play.

Injuries – A definite part of the game, both during the game and prior. More so than any other sport, hockey coaches are extremely guarded about injuries. So many times you will see descriptions as vague as "upper body injury" given to players. There is no way to know for sure how hurt a player is unless you are actually at practice or sit in the room with the doctor.

Back-up goaltenders – A goalie change before the game could change the outcome. There is a big difference between the starter and the backup. Think of a football game where Tom Brady is benched just before the start of the game so that he can get a rest!

Goaltenders in general – A goalie can stand on his head on any given night and steal a game. This X factor is always in play in hockey. One team can completely outplay the other, but if the goalie is hot, there is nothing getting by him.

So do you ignore hockey all together? I can’t! I love the sport. So here are a few helpful guidelines to get you interested in playing some hockey games:

1. Look for situations where a team has played three games in four nights. Or four games in five nights. Particularly, if the team is an East Coast team playing out West or vice versa. I always like to take the home team in those cases. These are "getaway games" for the road team. They are focused on getting home and ending the road trip. Hockey is a grind and that third or fourth game is a nightmare on their legs. They aren’t skating as well and this results in more penalties, which leads to more scoring. Take the home team and bet the over when you find these cases.

2. Speaking of over/unders, this is a very good way to attack hockey games. Many over/unders are set at 5 in hockey, but the number is usually obviously leaning toward one direction or the other. If you follow teams and know your hockey, these numbers seem to jump out. Toronto, for instance, is horrible defensively. I have gone with the over with them in virtually every game this year and have not been disappointed.

3. Go for the wins and favorites. Playing spreads in hockey is a recipe for disaster…unless you bet against the Leafs! Empty net goals and teams adding a late goal by pulling the goalie can wreck point spreads in hockey. Avoid those spreads completely and just side with the winner.

4. Look for back-to-backs and teams coming off rest. There are many cases in the NHL when one team will actually be spending the night in a city while the other team is on the road. I know of a case last year when the Sabres were playing in Chicago and flew back to Buffalo that night, not getting into town until 4 am. The Penguins had the night off and were staying in a hotel in Buffalo. The rested Penguins pasted the Sabres in Buffalo. Additionally, that team playing the back-to-back, will probably start their backup. Again, a huge difference in goals and wins and losses.

So don’t be afraid to take a look at the frozen pond for some interesting action. If you know your teams, you can be successful looking at hockey games.

George Clooney was in a memorable movie called The Perfect Storm. In it, Clooney plays a fisherman who just hauled in a fantastic catch and was poised to return home with tremendous riches. However, he and his crew are notified of an immense storm blocking their passage home. The crew has to decide to wait out the storm and risk losing their catch, or go ahead and risk it through the storm. They go ahead and blindly sail through the worst storm in history and perish. There is something to be said about being conservative and safe. Betting can be an emotional enterprise, especially for those novices. It can also be addictive. But being the smart captain of your betting ship can keep your head above water.

There is great risk in betting the exotics: point spreads, over/unders, parlays, etc. There can be great reward, but the perils of playing those bets as your bread and butter can be extremely risky. I espouse a conservative approach to betting. There are plenty of games out there for you to play that have W’s written all over them. Take this weekend for example:

Florida was a big favorite this weekend against a mediocre Arkansas team. Historically, Florida has a tendency to obliterate over/under numbers as well as point spreads. But this is a team struggling to get receivers open and their quarterback is not quite 100% healthy. Many folks went with the heavily favored Gators to cover the spread. Those people were out some hard earned coin, while I sat back comfortably on my couch with a W.

College is usually the easiest place to find large point spreads and tilted matchups. Take your easy catches and bag a bunch of easy wins. With those winnings, you can come up with some three game parlays to boost your winnings. 10+ point spreads can be found fairly easily each weekend. Pick three big favorite winners and parlay them and bank your easy money.

Building some consistency in what you do will help gain you some much needed confidence as well as coin. This will give you the ability to speculate later and try some dogs and exotics to really boost your winnings. But getting home to port is the key. If you keep taking those chances with longshots and dogs, you will run into the perfect storm and find yourself at the bottom of the ocean.

Congratulations to jacktjl, who won his first Overall Champion Trophy (Oct 12 to Oct 18). He finished the week with 1,797 chips on 18 bets, winning by a narrow margin of 40 chips over 2nd place finisher KellRawLive. jacktjl won two NCAAF 3-way parlays that earned him a total of 875 chips. That’s some smart pickin’. Who will be this week’s smartest picker?

Congratulations to LordHatton, who once again won the Overall Champion Trophy (Oct 5 to Oct 11). He finished the week with a ridiculous 3,515 chips on 172 bets, winning by a margin of 2,301 chips over 2nd place finisher verypink. That’s pretty impressive folks. This guy is no statistical anomaly either. He ranks 1st in more Genius Categories than I can count and is picking at a mind-boggling win rate of 80%+ in the NFL NFC South and the NFL NFC East Genius Categories. He’s the heavy favorite to win this week’s competition. Can anyone overtake him?

In case you don’t know, the Product User Group (PUG) is a collection of passionate WinTheTrophy users who provide input on the application’s development roadmap and get an exclusive preview of upcoming features. A little over a week ago, the PUG held its first meeting. Attendees included cscairns, brian, sean, jdavis and LordHatton.

We had an excellent conversation about the product, including likes, dislikes, ideas, bugs and so on. Both jdavis and LordHatton contributed some fantastic ideas on how to make the product even better and also pointed out some bugs.

1. LordHatton and jdavis both suggested that we make the Vegas Odds On/Off Toggle persist when you log back in after a logoff (or across different computers). sean immediately implemented this idea.

2. LordHatton pointed out a bug with how Recent Bets were being sorted, which sean also fixed immediately.

3. LordHatton suggested that we offer a Bet Week Graph that visually tracks and displays how users are performing over the course of a week. This is a great idea and sean is working to include it in the next release.

4. jdavis reiterated andrew’s desire for automated rules-based betting. Though we didn’t have this planned for immediate development, sean is taking the initiative to start working on an API service that will enable users to write programs that place bets automatically.

I my humble opinion, WinTheTrophy really forces us to take a new look at picking sport event winners. By providing the tools to take a close look at the events on a given day, you can really become a better (no pun intended) sports fan. We all know that any sport takes years to learn and even more time to understand the nuances. The timeline to a PhD is shortened if you actually played the sport, but not many people have had the chance to play a college or professional sport. But having played the sport at any level isn’t a prerequisite to becoming an expert. In fact, many so-called experts never participated in a single down, inning, minute, match or whatever it may be labeled. These experts have mastered another set of skills and their vigilance and study allows them to see things that others don’t. That’s why we value their opinions and that’s what I contend WinTheTrophy helps you to attain: a better, more enlightened, fuller, more descript, understanding of sports and the teams that play one another.

To me, understanding what happens behind the scenes is often as important as what you see in the black and white (stats). Many a team has come into a season highly ranked, populated by great recruits, returning seniors, a tested coaching staff, a reasonable schedule, but failed to even make the post-season. Why? X factors. You see a growing contingency of reporters, online bloggers, behind-the-scenes insiders, and so forth, who work assiduously to try and shed some light on what is happening in the locker room, the front office, the practice field and at the homes of the players. Television shows – like HBO’s Hard Knocks – take us through the entire pre-season; it’s during these episodes, taken as a whole, that we begin to see the complex dynamics of fielding a professional football team (let alone a successful team). Distractions abound, injuries lurk, coaching opinions fluctuate, public opinion peaks and ebbs, players’ confidence rise and plummet, money issues dominate, signings linger, agents do agent stuff, fans prognosticate and so on and so on. What you begin to understand is that building and maintaining a team at the highest level is equal parts – art, science and luck.

So back at home our lonely sports picker must sift through a litany of data, feelings and instincts to make an accurate prediction. And the good ones do just that: they objectively look at the facts, make a choice and then lay it out against their instinct and – if all factors are green-lighted – they place their pick and sit back to either muse at their genius or watch as their calculation fails miserably. However, even the losses – like in real sports or real life – teach something and those that learn something from these mistakes become better at an infinitely iterative process that ultimately helps them reduce the chance factor to a minute number (or fraction thereof). And these are the people who have evolved from the casual prognosticator into something more akin to a highly successful Wall Street trader. They are better than average and their opinions get noticed, and once they have a reputation, they must continue to perform or they will be disregarded as a fluke.

WinTheTrophy lets you develop these skills and objectively follow your development or regression. Numbers don’t lie and you can see from the categories where your talents reside and where you need improvement. Or, if you happen to be really good at one thing, WinTheTrophy shows you what that is and that, my friends, is certainly something worth knowing. So sports picking is just like commodities trading, stock picking, monetary investing and a vast array of other activities that are based on the choice of an individual who ingests a massive amount of information, makes a choice and wagers that that outcome will come to fruition. It’s infinitely difficult, perceptibly humbling and a skill that only a few can ever really master. So give it a try and see if you have the gift…you’ll never know if you don’t give it a try. I truly believe WinTheTrophy makes you learn, appreciate and ultimately become a better sports fan.

So you’re sitting around watching your 29th sporting event in a row and you’ve been clicking back and forth between 8 games in 5 different sports and that still isn’t enough. Well, you may need a little medical help, but other than that you’re a perfect candidate for WinTheTrophy. In fact, even if you only watch an occasional sporting event, you’ll find this free fantasy sports betting site fun, engaging and challenging.

After you signup, you fill out your profile (optional) – and you’re ready to start picking. “But wait,” you say, “I have no understanding of sports wagering and don’t really care to learn.” In that case, WinTheTrophy has you covered with its approach to automatically interpreting the complex numerical nomenclature of sports handicapping. Behind the scenes at WinTheTrophy, the complex numerical valuations of a sports wager are analyzed and then translated into normal every-day language like “Huge Payout,” “Tiny Payout,” “Favorites,” and “Underdogs.” Sound easy? It is.

To place a bet, you just click on one of the buttons associated with the three different bet types: moneyline ("Who will win?"), point spread ("Who will cover?") and over/under ("How many total points?"). After you click the button, you then choose how many free chips you’d like to wager. Upon entering the amount, WinTheTrophy automatically calculates how many chips you will win and – if you think that is fair – you go ahead and confirm the wager.

After you have placed a bet, you can see your wager(s) on your personalized My Bets page, which allows you to review your selections, watch the scores in near real-time and see whether you have won, lost or pushed.

Bad week? No problem because each week your 1,000 free chips resets and a new contest for the Weekly Leaderboard begins. Each week you are automatically entered in the Weekly Leaderboard contest. And if you wager with skill and consistency, you have a good shot at victory, online accolades, a coveted virtual trophy and Points (virtual currency units).

Points are also accrued as you wager, make comments, post blog content, invite friends and so forth. In the future, WinTheTrophy will have a virtual store where you can redeem these Points for virtual goods, bonuses, skins, avatars and other items.

Another key feature of the WinTheTrophy is personal betting statistics. On your personalized “My Profile” page, you can see your cumulative wagering record in the 100+ categories WinTheTrophy tracks. With this information, you can identify your betting strengths and weaknesses, compare your skills against others and formulate personal betting techniques that might yield more winnings.

So no matter who you are, you can have fun and benefit from the features of WinTheTrophy. Follow your favorite team, make a wager (or two hundred) and sit back and watch your team, and know that you have a little extra incentive for them to win (or lose) or to score a lot (or a little). It’s always fun watching your favorite team but WinTheTrophy will make it even better.

Well folks, just when you thought the Overall Champion Trophy was in your case and you could send smack down comments to your fellow WTT competitors, brian comes out of nowhere with a massive 4-way parlay to rescue him from the realm of the pathetic. Via that parlay, brian climbed the ladder from 23rd to 3rd with one game left and then he bet big on the Black and Gold. In a crazy TD shootout, brian hit five bets on the Steelers/Chargers scoring festival to steal (no pun intended) the victory from second place Matt2503 by a razor thin 67 chips.

Overall Champion Trophy chase ended up in the following order:

1. brian 1,747
2. Matt2503 1,680
3. jacktjl 1,490

Notables include:

JimmytheMeek with a 6-2 week (75%)
Nickelicious with a 4-2 week (67%)
Matt2503 with a 15-8 week (65%)
verypink with a 18-11 week (62%)

cscairns missed a 6-way AND a 7-way by just one game each! Great week so sharpen your pencil, reload, and see if anyone can take the crown from brian.