October is arguably the greatest month of the year. I would say sports year but at LockLeagues they are one and the same. The football season is up and running, playoff baseball is going on all month, and the NBA and NHL are starting up again. This is a dream for any sports lover and a perfect opportunity to put your ball knowledge to the test. My high school buddies and I seized this opportunity a few years ago by starting an annual picks competition.
Locktober is a simple concept. Every day for the whole month we check the board, find our best bet, and text it in the group chat. My good friend and colleague Haymonster, author of the Mortal Lock, would record everyone’s picks in a spreadsheet and track the results. We did not just track wins and losses, we scored the picks based on the odds (sound familiar?). This rewarded long odds wins and punished short odds losses. The daily scores were aggregated and standings were tracked over time, with a winner being crowned at the end of the month.
The six guys who participated in this are all known to place wagers on sports from time to time, but Locktober is a competition for the love of the game. I have never won Locktober but I look forward to it every year. The group chat is buzzing every day with smack talk, accusations of getting picks from outside sources, and of course the daily reminder for a certain participant to get his pick in. There’s no money on the line but every Locktober pick makes that game way more exciting.
Last year when we were running Locktober, we had the major realization that holy shit this is really fun and there’s not really anything like it. That realization, combined with a discussion on the collective skillset of the crew, led us to get to work on building LockLeagues. Initially, it was just going to be a platform where you could run a Locktober competition for you and your crew. We quickly realized that that was not a robust enough idea to justify creating a whole website and company and app and brand and blog and whatever else we’re gonna put out next. That’s when we expanded to the customizable sports picking platform you know and love. This expansion made me realize that my meager coding abilities would not be enough so I brought in a few buddies from college with stronger computer science backgrounds. We had our crew assembled at the end of last year and from there it’s been a nonstop process of development, testing, improvement, marketing, user outreach, more testing, and more improvement.
LockLeagues has changed a lot over the past year. What I originally saw as just a cool way to track my bets and compete with my friends I now understand to be a significant pivot away from the troubling direction that society is heading in with respect to gambling. I’m no prude; I love tossing a few pesos on the mortal lock of the week as much as anyone else. However, there is a difference between that and sitting there by yourself betting on every single pitch of a baseball game or “trading” on something stupid or even morally wrong on one of those prediction markets. I love LockLeagues and I am proud of LockLeagues because it is first and foremost a social experience. If you take the Sunday Night Football over to make money, you might win or you might lose and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter and the house is always going to win in the long run. If you take the Sunday Night Football over to rub it in your stupid under-betting friend’s face and crush him in a LockLeague, that’s just good clean fun.
There’s a ridiculous idea being pushed in some circles online that caring about sports is a waste of time or unmasculine or just generally bad for a host of other reasons. That’s a crock of shit. There’s nothing more important than community and relationships, and sports are a great, maybe even perfect, way to grow and maintain those relationships. Something I did not realize until a few months ago but I think is really cool is that everyone on the LockLeagues team is someone I played sports with. Most of them are guys I met through sports, going all the way back to teeball (shoutout Professor Bags). We realized the importance of sports and building community through sports and have been working relentlessly to expand that community to all current and future LockLeagues users.
With October right around the corner, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to get in on the idea that started it all. You can head over to the league creation page and select Locktober from the dropdown and hit apply. Choose a name and set up a password if you want and you’re ready to roll! These leagues require one pick a day that must be unique throughout the league. All sports are available and there are so many to choose from in Locktober. The odds bounds are -150 to +200 as they have always been for this competition. Leagues can have up to 20 members but they are still fun even with a small crew. We are also running a Locktober Community League, the top finishers of which will receive some sweet LockLeagues prizes. We have loved doing Locktober for the past half decade and we hope you enjoy trying it out! We appreciate everyone in the LockLeagues community and look forward to welcoming new members. Have fun, stay sharp, spread the word, and always settle the score.