2013 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets

Last year I posted my 2012 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets a day before the event and it created the biggest traffic spike in this blog’s modest history.

This year I’ve taken all the fun and originality of those old printable spreadsheet and recast them into fully automated entry and score keeping spreadsheets that allow you to track every player’s score in every pool in real time with the click of your mouse.

Here’s what you’ll find in this years pools:
• Six uniquely awesome pools (Basic, Confidence, Rank All Nominees, Salary Cap and the all new Biggest Loser and Upset pools)
• Easy to fill out entry forms with drop down menus for every selection
• And super slick score sheet with sortable standings and real time scoring for up to 50 players

If you want to dive in and learn more, check out the tutorial below. Or keep reading for pics and in-depth descriptions for each of the six game modes.

2013 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets Tutorial

Download Links

Due to the drop down menus and fancy formulas, you need Microsoft excel to use the spreadsheets.

Customizable Entry Form
2013 Oscar Pool Score Sheet

Please watch the tutorial if you plan on running your own pool. If you’re just curious at this point feel free to read more below and check out some of the game modes.

Join My Pool

If you don’t feel like creating your own pool but still want to play with the spreadsheets than feel free to join my pool. You still have until 2:00PM central (UPDATE: Deadline pushed back to 5:00PM central!) on Oscar Sunday to get your sheets in for my contest. Full instructions here.

I’m running all six pools detailed below.

2013 Oscar Basic Pool

HOW TO PLAY: This is the simplest of all the Oscar pools to play in. You simply pick one winner for each category and get points for each correct answer. Some categories have different point values based on how prestigious the award is, so correctly picking the Best Picture category is worth far more than guessing the winner for Best Animated Short. The person with the most points at the end of the show wins. The tie-breaker is total number of correct guesses.

2013 Oscar Confidence Pool

HOW TO PLAY: Select one winner from the drop down menus for each of the 24 categories listed below. Then, under the “Conf Points” column, select a number from 24 to 1 based on how confident you are about each pick (24 = most confident). You can only use each number once. Each correct pick will net you the corresponding amount of points. The person with the most total points wins.

2013 Oscar Rank All Nominees (RAN) Pool

HOW TO PLAY: RAN stands for Rank All Nominees, and that’s exactly what you get to do in this pool. Rank each nominee for each of the 24 categories below from 1st to last in order of how likely you think they are to win. To rank them, click on a yellow cell below and then click the down arrow to see a drop down menu of the remaining nominees. Fill out all the yellow boxes to complete the form. The higher you rank the eventual winning nominee, the more points you’ll receive (Rank/Points charts listed next to each category). The person who finishes with the most total points by the end of the awards show wins!

SCORING EXAMPLE: Let’s say Argo wins Best Picture and you ranked it 1st. You would receive 80 points, which would be 32 more points than anyone who ranked it 2nd and 56 or 72 more points (respectively) than anyone who ranked it 3rd or 4th. But if you ranked it 2nd, then you’d gain ground against anyone who picked it 3rd or lower, but lose ground to all who picked it 1st.

2013 Salary Cap Oscar Pool

Every dollar counts in the Oscar salary cap game. Pick a winner for each of the 24 categories below, while keeping your total money spent under $1000. Each correct pick is worth one point, but don’t throw your extra money away because the tie-breaker is how much money you left unspent. Nominees are priced at $1 per percentage point (ranging in price from $90 to $1). You MUST select a winner for each of the 24 categories, but FLEX nominees can be left blank. You can see how much you have left via the “Unspent Money” box to the right.

2013 Oscar Biggest Loser Pool

HOW TO PLAY: Pick a nominee from each category that you think will lose. The more favored the nominee is to win, the more points you get when they lose. For example, if you pick a 25% chance nominee to lose, you get 25 points if they do. The catch is that each time one of your picks wins you lose an increasing amount of points. As you can see from the color-coded chart on the far right, picking a few accidental winners is healthy, but once you start getting into the red your chances of winning quickly fade away.

2013 Oscar Upset Pool

INTRODUCTION: The upset pool was created with the idea of, “What if we gave you incentive to gamble on nominees that are longshots to win?” In most other pools, if one nominee has a 50% chance to win, and another has a 25% chance, it’s very hard to justify picking the 25% chance nominee over the 50% one since the 50% one is twice as likely to win. But this pool erases that deficit by making the 25% chance nominee worth twice as many points as the 50% nominee so you can pick either nominee without putting yourself at a disadvantage.

BASE POINT VALUES: If you look over to chart above you’ll notice that the lower the odds of a nominee winning, the more points its worth. There’s actually some really simple math behind this. 100% of 10 = 10. 50% of 20 = 10. 10% of 100 = 10. 1% of 1000 = 10. The point system is designed to give you an even money gamble no matter which nominee you choose.

Thanks for checking these spreadsheets out

I spent well over 100 hours putting these spreadsheets together because I absolutely love playing these pools and sharing the fun with all who want to partake. If you have an extra kick ass time using these spreadsheets, feel free to click the Donate button and shoot some appreciation my way, or just comment below or contact me to tell me about how your experience went. Either way, thanks a ton for checking out the spreadsheets. I really get a kick out of creating something I love and sharing it with the world.