Zock is a new piece of free software for organizing betting games.

It is a “betting office” targeted at cliques of friends or co-workers which would like to organize a betting game for a sport event.

Right now, it needs testers. If you are interested in using it, read on.

If you like to bet only for fun and make a tournament with points, or if you want to bet money, Zock is the software for you.

Zock is brand new: the current version is 0.5.1. This means that there’s still more to come, although it is already quite sophisticated.

Go to Zock’s home or have a look at some screenshots.

Installing Zock

To install it:

1. Download the tarball from launchpad, extract it into a folder on your web server or your local machine.

2. Make sure the “installation”-folder and the “src/vars.php”-file are writable by the web server.

3. Access it preferably with Firefox and fill in the necessary database information; then, click “install now!”

4. There you go! The installation is perfect. Delete the folder installation and login with your chosen user name and the password “admin”

5. Change your password in the menu “My Profile”/”Password”.

6. Click on Admin, Betting Games and Create Betting Games

7. You will be guided through the creation of a betting game.

8. Finally, get your friends to participate and everything is perfect and even the most annoying games become interesting.

Using Zock

Once you created a betting game with a couple of matches, you have ranking of the betters which are fighting for a possible jackpot. If you give a wrong bet, you get -1 point; the ranking is especially flexible, and changes a lot. The overview makes it possible to see the bets of all the people as soon the placing phase is over. This way, everyone has access to the other bets, especially to those of the admin.

Zock can be customised — it even has different money distribution algorithms — or you define who gets what share.

Testing it

Zock is fairly new. Please test it and let the developers know if bugs or problems.