How Pools work
What's a Pool?
Your group makes picks on real NFL games, and there are three ways to play. Pick'em is one NFL week: pick the winner of every game, and the most correct picks wins. Survivor and Losers run all season: one pick a week, and you can never pick the same team twice. Get it wrong and you take a strike. Most Pools give one, so one miss and you're out. Outlast everybody else and you win.
Three ways to play
Pick a format to see how it plays. The examples use a $20 entry with 3 places paid. Your host sets the real numbers before the Pool opens.
How to play
Pick'em · Pick each game's winner. Most correct picks wins.
- 1 12345
up to 5 entries
Join before kickoff
Entries close when this Pick'em's first game kicks off. Up to 5 entries per person, each with its own picks.
- 2
+1 
0 0Pick every winner
Pick winners straight up. Lines are shown for reference. Each correct pick earns one point. Wrong, missing, and tied-game picks earn zero.
- 3 Kickoff
Picks lock at kickoff
Change each pick until that game's kickoff. Other players can't see a pick until its game kicks off. Your host can see every pick.
- 4 You 44 52 47 total
Call the tiebreaker
Guess the total points in the tiebreaker game, overtime included. Closest wins, over or under.
- 5 1st Jon 9 correctT-2nd Mike 8 correctT-2nd Sarah 8 correct
$20 entry, 3 places paid
Most correct wins
Most correct picks takes 1st. Equal scores go to the tiebreaker.
Still tied after the tiebreaker, Mike and Sarah split the money for 2nd and 3rd.
Edge cases
Tiebreaker
You can change your guess until that game kicks off. Any guess beats no guess.
Tied places
Entries still tied split the money for the places they tied for. Winnings from the same person's entries are combined.
Void games
Cancelled and postponed games are void and don't count. If the tiebreaker game is void, tied entries share places. If every game is void, the Pool is cancelled with no winners.
That's the Pool. Simple to start, brutal to finish, and somebody's always sweating a Monday night score.
Common questions
Pick'em plays one NFL week: pick the winner of every game, and the most correct picks wins. Survivor and Losers run all season with the same weekly pick and opposite goals. In a Survivor Pool (sometimes called a suicide, eliminator, or last-man-standing pool) your team has to win. A loss costs a strike. In a Losers Pool it's flipped: your team has to lose. A win costs a strike. Your host sets the format before the Pool opens, and it doesn't change once you're in.
Not in Survivor or Losers. Once your entry picks a team, that team is burned for the rest of the season, win or lose. It's the one fixed rule in every Survivor and Losers Pool, and it's what turns this into a strategy game instead of a coin flip. Week 1 feels easy. Week 10 feels like a squeeze. Four picks in, those teams are gone even if all four results went your way. The slate narrows too: bye weeks remove teams from a given week, and your used-teams list keeps growing. Pick'em has no reuse rule. Every game is a fresh pick.
A few settings, all locked in before the Pool opens. Strikes default to one: sudden death, one wrong pick and you're out. Hosts can allow more: three strikes means you can take two hits and still be alive. A tie doesn't clearly satisfy "your team won" or "your team lost," so the host decides which way it breaks. Some Pools count it as a strike, others let every entry survive. A missed pick is the host's call too. By default it costs a strike. With Auto-Pick on, an entry with no pick gets an Auto-Pick at the week's first kickoff: its biggest unused favorite in Survivor, or its biggest unused underdog in Losers. It counts as a used team, and you can change it until it locks. Pick'em has no strikes or Auto-Picks: a tied game or a missed pick just scores zero. Multiple entries are allowed too, up to a cap your host sets: five is the default. Each extra entry is its own lifeline: its own picks, its own strikes, its own used-teams list.
That's a wipeout. If every remaining entry takes its final strike in the same week, those entries tie for first. Same idea if the season ends with more than one entry still alive: all entries left standing tie for first.
The host sets an entry fee (per entry, not per player) and decides what share of the pot goes to winners. 90% is common, with the rest covering the house or a cause. Not playing for money? Pools work just as well for bragging rights. Add your Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App once. Players get a pay button with the amount filled in when they join. Winners add a handle, and you pay them in one tap. When a player taps pay, Settle Up marks them pending for you to confirm. Sunday Squares never holds the money.