How does it look?

Click into the graphs to enlarge them.

A slightly misleading graph this week: I had a couple of crashes last week and I lost some figures from the end of the last but one round. So to skip over the missing numbers and end up with the current ones, I've combined 2 rounds of games in the graph above. As a result, everybody appears to have had an exceptionally good week whereas only Red Wedgewood excelled over the period, earning 30 points over the 2 rounds. For a short while a couple of our players were actually reducing the gap between them and the game leader. But over the two rounds, only Red and Stokecitynil (24 points) reduced the gap on ucananalyse2much.












This week's super climbers: stokecitynil and Red Wedgewood....

Club points week by week. At the last update here, Liverpool had just taken a solid looking hold on the premier league. But then they bumped into Everton and continued 1 point at a time while Man United took the lead with their record run of games without conceding goals. Chelsea took a straightforward win while Arsenal stuttered. Aston Villa now look worthy 3rd placers, even though every time I watch them they have an off day.

Meanwhile at the foot of the league it's still incredibly tight as they fight each other to the death.

New look PTS game

I think I am the very first player on the game, because insomnia struck very early this morning. So what have they done? It's got more of a Guardian house-style look - though you still can't use html code on the forums, unlike on the Guardian talk pages - and the clock on the forum message board is still giving the wrong time.

But the biggest change is that there is no all players' forum. This means that it's going to be very hard to keep in touch with the regulars. For this we have Puck to thank.

If you want to join up with old banter-buddies and join a friend's league where there is a forum of our own, send an email to puckfreepredictions@googlemail.com and I'll send you an invitation out from there.

Euro final day and I can't post on PTS

It may be a simple administrative error, but this morning I was unable to post messages on the site. They wouldn't have decided to switch the forums off on final day of all days, would they?

What future for the Guardian PTS site?

At the moment the site is pretty dormant and there is no PTS input whatsoever, all links in the main paper have now been taken down and there has been no indication about whether the game will be relaunched in the new season. I think the Guardian might pull the plug.

So one day we might find that the site is no longer there. There's Facebook as a possible alternative rendezvous but although I have a FB account I don't feel at home there. Would a blog address such as this one be an alternative? We can have more than one managing the account, publish and if necessary delete comments. It might be possible to carry on running our silly games and banter from here. I admit I don't know much about the functionality* of these blogger.com addresses so any expert advice would be more than welcome.

*Oops, I'm talking gobbledegeek...I mean I don't know what you can do.

Damn, it's raining at Old Trafford

This wouldn't worry footballers, but cricket's a different matter.

Anyhow, while the PTS site is more or less dormant - or in its dotage - I was thinking about a good way of setting up a little virtual betting game for the European Championships. I'm looking for input about what you think might be fun throughout the competition and what kind of bets I should include.

Because I would be doing this on a simple spreadsheet and my Excel skills are far from excellent, I have to keep the format reasonably simple. So something as complicated as, say, giving everybody a chance to bet on exact scores on all the games would be completely unworkable. Any input as to what bets you would like to see would be more than welcome. And, I note that it's possible to co-own these blogs, so anybody who feels they might be able to contribute over the Euros, please let me know.

One way of simplifying it that appeals to me would be to theme it into red, white and blue teams - partly to put a British interest back into it - but mostly to keep it workable. Take the top seeded teams whose home colours are predominantly red, white and blue, limit a small selection of bets to these teams. When the top seeded red team gets eliminated, the game passes to the next highest seeded red team, until there are no more red teams. That way, there will never be more than 3 teams to bet on at any given time, and when it comes to the final, I'll increase the number of betting choices so that there are the same number of choices all the time. Bet this is clear as mud...let me know if you've any comments.