So yesterday I hit up the shell station next to my work 'cause I seem to recall magazines hitting the shelves on Tuesday, and saw the Pooler's Guide! Yess!! So I bought it without even thinking and then when I got home I realized IT WAS LAST YEARS COPY!!! What the hell do they still have like TEN copies of that on the shelf for??!?! I always thought they had a "display until" date!! Anyways it's my own fault for not even looking at the cover fully, but still :S
My go-to mags (and I've always preferred hard copy) were Forecaster and McKeens (Actually the best ever was the ol' Hockey Pool Guide Book). I get them all anyways, but I always preferred those two mags for their individual player write-ups.* All of the mags have various interesting articles, and I like to get each one's individual thoughts on the rookie crops.
- Forecaster is a fine magazine, my #1
- McKeens is a close second, but I haven't seen it in print in a while. You can still buy it online though and print out the PDF
- Pooler's Guide has improved quite a bit since if first came out, but is still seems to have a heavy eastern bias (I'm in Alberta)
- The Hockey News is borderline crap imo
- The Sportsnet mag I purchased for the first time last year, and it had some interesting ways of presenting data, as well as some progressive pooling ideas, but a lot of how I prepare for draft day involves hard prediction numbers, so the "point range" predictions were not quite as useful
I bought Dobber's once before, but that was quite a few years ago, and I wan't impressed. I might have to check back because I think he was just starting out when I last bought, and I keep hearing it's decent.
Finally, I usually don't go into a draft without a copy of the Ultimate Pool Preview. The guy who runs it pretty much does what I had been painstakingly doing for years by hand, that is, running an average of all the projected numbers for all the players from every mag that I would get. It was hugely time consuming, and the UPP pretty much gives me those numbers (plus other useful stats like three year average, etc.) all in one editable spreadsheet.
Looking at this list I'm now wondering if I don't spend way more money on pooling than I actually win...