Side Project: PickSixtyFour

Twenty years ago, my dad started running an unorthodox March Madness pool for his friends and employees.

The gist of the pool was that instead of picking every NCAA tournament game, as you do in a typical bracket challenge, players received a budget and “wagered” on a handful of games. If they picked the winning team, they received the amount they bet multiplied by that team’s seed, or as Dad memorably put it in the original rules:

$100 on the UC-Irvine Anteaters at a 13 seed would return 100 x 13 = enough money to buy an actual Anteater

The player with the most money accrued at the end of the tournament, won.

For the better part of 20 years, Dad ran the pool by calling people on the phone, harassing them for picks, and tabulating the results in Excel. In 2015, I had learned enough Ruby on Rails to suggest there might be a better way, and so the pool made its online debut.

Since 2015, I’ve moved PickSixtyFour (as Dad eventually branded it) from Heroku to Firebase and swapped the Rails / Postgres stack for a lightweight Cloud Firestore / Cloud Functions backend. I’ve also rewritten the web app with Angular and NgRx twice.

The website is available year-round, although it’s pretty quiet from April to February. Dad handles all of the writing and marketing, so for better or worse, I can’t take credit for anything written there.

Link: PickSixtyFour