Software

So, if you are here reading this you are either extremely bored or digging for more cornhole in the North Country. And, if you are digging for more cornhole in the North Country, you might be interested in this piece.

When I started playing a little more seriously, I started practicing more. When I started practicing more, there were times just throwing bags against myself just wasn’t productive and every now and again I would find myself screwing around rather than being productive. That is when I did some digging and found an app in the App Store called Scoreholio (free with paid features). I wasn’t looking for anything too invasive, just a quick way to track some simple stats while throwing and low and behold, outside of all of the advanced tracking, scoreboard, tournament finding parts, it has a dedicated practice tab.

This practice tab allows you to play against the ghost (GhostHolio) or do a Deca Round (Deca-Holio) to play against your previous scores in a 10 round match. Now do you need this software to practice, absolutely not. Does it help when you have no one to play with and you want a little bit of competition, of course it does.

Ghostholio is simple. You are playing against the Ghost. You pick the Ghost level you want to play from the following options for the difficulty of the Ghost:

Easy – Ghost scores 1-3 points per round
Medium – Ghost scores 4-6 points per round
Hard – Ghost scores 7-9 points per round
Expert – Ghost scores 10-12 points per round
Ben (creator of Scoreholio) – Ghost scores 0-12 points per round
Whittmart – Ghost scores 9-12 points per round

When you start the game, you are shown a scoreboard which shows you how many points the Ghost scored in that round. Your goal is to beat that round and the score changes based on how many points you score compared the Ghost. It also tracks how you scored (3 on, 1 in; 3 in, 1 on; 3 in, 1 off; etc….) to help you keep track of stats on where your room for improvement is. You play the game, tracking each round until the game is over, then the game is saved to your stats. This practice game is simple, just try to beat the ghost. As it is not even close to actually playing a round, I will occasionally bring one or two extra bags and throw then before I start throwing my bags to create some blockers or different bag layouts to add some realism.

If you though GhostHolio was simple, wait until you try Deca-Holio. The game here is simple. You get 10 rounds to score as many points as possible. You are playing against yourself and a clean board. This is great practice to just blast as many bags into the hole as possible and compare to see how you compare against previous attempts. It also keeps track of stats based on how many points you score so you can see similar percentages as you would in GhostHolio.

But wait, there’s more. So much more.

Scoreholio is also the backbone to so many tournaments and leagues across the nation. If you are traveling and want to find a tournament or a blind draw, open the app and search where you are going or where you are. If there is a tournament listed, you can typically pre-register in the app.

Also, let’s say you want to run a tournament, with less than 32 teams/people. And you want that tournament to be a round robin into an elimination tournament, a single elimination tournament, or a double elimination tournament, that is free too. Just create an organizer account, and in a few simple steps once you have logged in you are running a tournament. It can be run on a phone, a tablet, or a computer (I use an old Chromebook). Here is the bonus, if you have an Amazon Fire Stick, you can run all of the brackets, matches, upcoming matches all on a separate TV, simply by installing the Scoreholio App and finding your tournament (which is loads close tournaments first, so it is super easy).

Ready for the best part of all of this —> IT IS FREE! ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!

Now, as it is an App, and not everything in life can be free, there are some paid features that you might want to purchase.

First, is SPR+. You know the stats I was talking about above in the practice modes. You get to see those for free for the game you just played. But, if you purchase SPR+ for $0.99 a month or $9.99 a year, you get to see all of your stats from every game you have played.

Second, if you are running tournaments or leagues, there are a few paid options. While the basic use is free, if you want to run a tournament with more than 32 teams or players on more than 8 courts, or want to have free chat support, or timers for the matches, you need to pay for one of the premium plans. There are $5, $10 and $20 a month options, with each level offering more support or features. The pricing structure can be found here.

So, this is all fine and dandy, but how easy is this “free” software to use? Let’s just say, that a recent tournament than I ran, my 10 year old son ran the tournament on the Chromebook in the middle of nowhere, using a weak cellphone hotspot connection. We also had a TV displaying the bracket and scores, again, run on a Fire Stick. All you have to do after creating the brackets is click on completed games and submit the scores. The software updates the brackets and displays who is playing on which courts. After playing the double elimination team tournament this past weekend, we had a group of us that wanted to play a quick single elimination individual tournament. It was as simple as entering the 12 names, clicking create bracket, then starting up. Everyone already knew how to read the screen and how to determine where they had to be. They reported scores back to the computer and it ran itself flawlessly.

I know this has been a long read already but I don’t want to end this there. Scoreholio is constantly running out new features, but this newest one is one I have been looking forward to the most. It already had the ability for the organizer to to provide tablets/phones for scoring that would report back to the live scoreboard for every match so people could see the different scores (at a higher paid subscription level). Now, currently in testing in the highest level, is the ability for any 1 of the people in the match to keep score on their personal phone using the same automatic functionality of the program. Now Scoreholio could have said this would remain available only to the highest subscription service to get more people to buy in, but instead, as soon as it was released, stated that it would be available across all subscription levels including the free level.

Also, in listening to Ben Budhu (creator and owner of Scoreholio) on a recent podcast, they are also working on a an inclusive league version of their software so you don’t have to run different “tournaments” each week of a league to make it work for any leagues you are running.

I will end this here. If you play cornhole you should have this app on your phone. At the very least, it has a free to use scoreboard when you are playing. At the very highest level, you will use it to check into tournaments, keep score during the game and submit scores to the tournament director, and keep your stats throughout the tournament.

All in all, you need this on your phone and if you are running tournaments, you need this in your bag!

Josh