Well, howdy there, folks.

Now, this message might strike you as being a strange thing, since normally you wouldn't hear from me until Sunday. But I'm very excited for this year's tournament, and couldn't wait to get this kickoff email out to you guys, for a very special reason.

You see, a few years ago, managing the Tournament Squares game specifically really had me in a rough spot - putting together the game does take a significant amount of time and organization, and at that moment, life had left me a little bit short of both. So I decided it was time to upgrade things, and give myself a faster and easier path to getting these games in your hands. What I did was to take everything I knew about running this game (which I dare say is rather a lot!) and started writing a web application. Folks, I am VERY very proud to introduce the beta test of famsquares.net, the first public release of a project that's taken three years to reach you, but which I'm super-hopeful will be the way we play our games going forward for a very, very long time.

Creating games is now as simple as pasting a link from ESPN and pushing a button. All those different teams and their beautiful colors - they're all stored in a database, available instantly. Games are scored automatically and winners assigned without me having to do anything at all (and potentially create an unfortunate typo). You can literally load a game in your web browser and watch the scores and winners update right before your eyes, every 5 minutes (give or take a microsecond or two). Winners are automatically tabulated so we can all get our prizes faster and easier. Games are conveniently grouped into events, making it simple to scroll back and see what games we've already played. Over time, I'm working on a way to import all of our previous events into this web app so you can go back and see them if you want to. PDFs are generated automatically - though they aren't even really needed anymore, now that the game sheets are right there in your web browser. Those long and crazy emails are now written right here in the app and emailed with another push of a button, with PDFs attached.

In fact, I'm writing this one in the app right now, with the biggest grin on my face you can imagine.

Now, a word of caution - this is a beta release. It's not completely ready for production yet. There will be bugs, and I'll be working on fixing them all through the tournament. Some things just don't work the way you'd expect yet - for example, the site will look absolutely horribly wrong on your phone. That's expected, I'm still working on a way to make the game playable on a small screen. I've got some ideas. Some things may not be fully consistent yet - the PDFs will look somewhat different, for example. This is just the way things go when you're releasing new software for the first time. But this is a big step into the future for us.

So, with that, I have to ask everyone a favor: please please PLEASE reply to this email to let me know that you've gotten it. Our automated email system is powerful but not fully tested yet - that's part of what this beta is for. Feedback - not just on the emails, but on the entire app - will be absolutely invaluable. Please, please, please don't hesitate to tell me what you're seeing or what you think we're missing or what just plain doesn't work right yet.

I'll sign off here, but I'm excited for both this tournament and for this chance to put a whole new generation of our game in your hands. And come this summer at Cannon Beach, I'll happily show anyone who's interested how the whole system works. I don't mind telling you, it's pretty cool.

Buckle up, folks - this could be amazing.

Best,

Chris