G’day joffa,

First a very warm welcome to all of you joining Score Five in its first footy tipping competition this 2009 season. Thanks to you we have players tipping from Oz (naturally), Kiwi-land, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong & Mainland China, Pommie-land, Wales, America, Canada & Qatar! All great places where locally footy thrives and is doing well under the AFL banner.

Our first prizewinner

The first person to sign up to Score Five Footy prize goes to Grant McArthur, based in beautiful Bali, Indonesia. Grant’s an avid footy fan and has been involved with the game at all levels. Good on yer Grant and good luck in the comp.

Snakes alive!! Daics is joining our tipping team

Although recovering from being bitten recently by one of the most deadly snakes in Australia, Collingwood legend No. 35 Peter Daicos still found time to help us with our game’s development. Peter likes the end result and told us “I think Score Five is a great development in the footy tipping world. It’s a bit more demanding than just picking the winner, and I like the fact that you could win a major prize for just one great round of predictions. Definitely a game you’re still in with a chance of winning right to the very end.”

Daics will also be providing his weekly tips as a guest tipper, but you have to sign up as a registered player to see them!! (More on that later)

We're pretty chuffed about having Peter on board, and we want to let as many people as possible know where to find his tips, so for those who are into that sort of thing we'd appreciate a Digg Up.

Invite a mate and increase your chances of winning

Don’t forget you can win valuable extra chances in our random player major prize (2 Grand Final tickets & a wad of pie & grog cash) by getting your mates to sign up and play the game. Each mate signing up gives you an extra chance of winning. Just use the “Invite a mate” system you see after logging in. The competition runs for the whole season, so you can keep on getting these extra draw chances right up to the 22^nd round.

Community leagues

Whether it’s your pub, footy club, office or just a good old family and friends group, we’ve designed our game system to enable you to play as a mini-community within our global community.

Remember it's all FREE. Anyone who plays in a community league is also in with a chance of winning our grand prizes, of course, and you're welcome to join a Global Supporters League and a public league as well.

Our system will do all the hard admin work for you round by round by:

. Recording everyone's entries and calculating their scores

. Generating your own league table showing your own player league and Global positions

. Providing you with a weekly round-by-round printable league report that’s easy to retrieve

The more the merrier and the greater the bragging rights!! And it's as easy as 1,2,3...So why not get one going today?

Meanwhile let’s welcome the following community leagues already up and running...

DRUMROLL PLEASE...

AFANA ; AFLGT ; City of Rockingham ; Crossmark ; FMSA ; Geo’s AFL ; gt ja jones ; HFW Melbourne ; Joffa’s League ; and last but certainly not least, the Qatar AFL Tipsters!

Welcome all and good luck

(although one or two of these leagues are looking slightly short on players at the moment – come on folks!)

Global Supporters Leagues – Who do you barrack for?

While on the subject of community leagues, don’t forget if you have a favourite team you can also play the special Global Supporters league communities we have created.

We’ve noticed that a good number of you have opted out of this feature, which is fine if you really want to. But hey guys, don’t be shy (well maybe for some teams that’s understandable.) Regardless of the number of leagues you are in, you only have to make one set of tips. They automatically carry through as predictions for all your leagues. Right now the Fremantle, both Melbourne clubs and St Kilda supporters’ leagues are looking a little light on the ground. Come on…show us who you barrack for!

By The Way - In addition to the existing “Top Twenty” global players report we’ve added another list that shows the top tipper from each of the 16 teams’ Global Supporters Leagues in our system. So don’t be shy…Show us which teams have the most knowledgeable fans!!

Editorial content

The Yanks may think they’ve got it down pat when it comes to game stats. Yes they’ve got much on baseball, gridiron, the NBA etc., but one thing is evident - they’re in the “B” division compared to what we have on footy.

In fact there’s often so many stats on footy that it can be a little hard to see the wood for the trees. So to help us through the season our very own Professor Statto will provide us with a weekly thought provoking dissection of some aspect of the game, to help you fine tune your tips and so move closer to our great prizes.

Of course no tipping competition would be complete without a resident expert tipster and we’ve recruited one of the game’s best in Mr. Magic who’ll post his tips every Monday evening after digesting the results and form shown in the previous round. Helping him along will be our guest tipster Daics, so plenty of good stuff coming down the road folks. To help you even further, Magic and Daics' tips show up automatically in a pop up as you rollover each game in the “Enter my tips” section, as do the current aggregate predictions of all our players. We hope you like this chance to “ask the audience”.

Part designed by Statto – have a look at our Five Facts page. It’s a sort of dashboard, barometer type thing to give you alternative overviews of what’s going on in the ovals and helps tweak those tips of yours.

Finally our winners and achievers are acknowledged and to be found on our Great Wall of Fame in our Famous Fives section. Watch it closely to see the experts amongst you emerge throughout the season. First man up??? Our man Grant from Bali, of course!

Your views are important to us –

Did you spot we have a discussion forum?

When designing and building the game we wanted to create a product that aligned with one of Australia’s national pastimes but that also had a different feel and dimensions to the basic traditional tipping game Simplicity was also key.

Although we’re proud of our game and the system, we mustn’t rest on our laurels. We always welcome and value your feedback and comments. If they need to be kept private please email them to us at scorefivenigel@yahoo.com, otherwise we encourage you to post them on our forum and let others add their views. It’s a lot easier for us to monitor and reply effectively, transparently and across our community that way, and it also cuts down on email traffic. In any event we’ll be looking for every opportunity to make our game better for you, because if we don’t there won’t be a “you” and that means no game!! So tell us please…”How’s my driving?”

Facebook

As an alternate way to play Score Five, we have a brand new Facebook Application available now. Once you link up your Score Five Footy and Facebook accounts, you can place your tips, check results, and see your league tables, all from within Facebook. Check it out, invite your mates to join – Facebook friends who join do count towards our random draw major prize – and let us know what you think of it!

Whatever else you do…Get yer tips in!!

At the time of writing, slightly more than 1/3^rd of you have entered round one tips, be they provisional or final.

No doubt many of you are looking to see who’ll recover from injuries, what the team selections may be, etc., before to making your final tips and that’s fine. But please remember you must get your tips for the entire round TWO hours before the first round game bounces off, otherwise you’ll lose a life – including a Banker game life. It’s always best to make some provisional tips and fine-tune them later. You can change your tips as often as you like before the round closes, but make sure you SAVE your tips. Our system will tell you the last time for entries each round, and unless you've opted out we'll send you a little reminder 24 hours before each round closes.

So good luck and have fun

We trust that you’ll enjoy our game safe in the knowledge that, even if you aren’t one of our ongoing league leaders, just one round of tipping brilliance could see you on the way to the MCG regardless of how you otherwise fared during the season.

Have fun

Nigel & all the Score Five team