How Do March Madness Squares Work? One Board for 63 Games

A March Madness squares pool runs in five steps, and only the first two take any effort from the host before the games start.

1. The host sets the square price, the games covered and every prize before anything sells.
2. Players claim squares on a blank 10x10 grid, or the host claims squares for them.
3. Once the board is full, the digits 0 to 9 get randomized along both edges.
4. Every game on the board pays the square matching each team's last digit.
5. The board stays the same for every round until the title game is over.

The order of steps two and three is what keeps the game fair. Players pick a spot on the grid while it's still blank, so the person who claimed a square on day one has exactly the same chances as the person who filled the last gap. Nobody ever chooses their own digits, and once the numbers are drawn the board locks with no new entries, swaps or changed claims for the rest of the tournament.

That one draw is the big difference from a bracket. A bracket rewards knowing which 12 seed is dangerous and stops being fun for half your office by the end of the first weekend, while a squares board rewards nothing but luck and keeps everyone in it until the last game. Plenty of groups run both side by side for exactly that reason. The mechanics are the same ones covered in our breakdown of how many squares belong in a pool, and 100 squares is still the size to start with for a tournament, since one board has to carry dozens of games and a smaller grid would hand the same few people a prize almost every night.

The winning square is the one where the last digit of the home team's score meets the last digit of the away team's score, checked at halftime and again at the final buzzer.

Take the 2026 championship as the example. Michigan, the team listed as home, led UConn 33-29 at halftime, so the halftime prize went to whoever held the square where a 3 for Michigan meets a 9 for UConn. Michigan won 69-63, so the final prize went to the square where a 9 for Michigan meets a 3 for UConn. The score itself doesn't matter beyond its last digit, which is why a 69 and a 79 pay exactly the same square.

College basketball plays two 20-minute halves rather than four quarters, so a basketball board has two scoring periods per game where a football board has four. That's also why the final prize is the one most hosts weight most heavily. A basketball score passes through nearly every digit on its way to the seventies, so the final digits are much harder to guess than in football, where touchdowns and field goals pile scores onto a handful of numbers.

Before the draw, settle which team goes on which side of the grid. Play Squares puts the team listed as home across the top and the team listed as away down the side for every game, which is simple to check against any scoreboard. Some printed pools use the winning team's digit across the top and the losing team's digit down the side instead, because tournament games are played at neutral sites and the home label can feel arbitrary. Both systems are equally fair to every player on the board. The winner and loser version just means the halftime prize has to follow whichever team is leading at the break, and a board that tracks the score live will see its pending square jump across the grid every time the lead changes. Pick one, write it down, and tell your players before they claim anything.

For 2027, cover the 63 games from the Round of 64 through the championship on April 5, and treat the new 12-game Opening Round as an optional extra.

The NCAA expanded the men's tournament from 68 teams to 76 for 2027. The old four-game First Four is gone, replaced by a 24-team Opening Round in Dayton and Wichita on March 16 and 17, and the 12 winners join the usual 64-team bracket. From there the tournament looks exactly the way it always has, which is good news for anyone who has run a board before.

Leaving the Opening Round off is what we'd recommend for most groups. Those 12 games are played by the lowest seeds before most people have even filled out a bracket, and adding them spreads the same prize pool over 75 games instead of 63, which shrinks every other prize to make room. It also squeezes your sign-up window, since the board has to fill and the numbers have to be drawn before the first game you're paying out. If your group wants something to watch on that Tuesday and Wednesday, include them and size their prizes like the Round of 64, but make the call before squares go on sale.

A few hosts scope a board down to one weekend, or run a second board for the Sweet 16 onward for people who missed the first one. Either of those works fine for a group that wants it. What we wouldn't do is start a fresh board for every game or every day, because one draw covering dozens of games is the whole appeal of the format and the reason it takes a host two minutes instead of two hours.

Pay a fixed amount for every game within a round, raise that amount as the rounds go on, and save halftime and reverse prizes for the title game.

The Round of 64 has 32 games and the title game has one, so an even split per game would pour half the prize pool into the first two days and leave the championship paying the same as a 1-16 blowout. Stepping the per-game prize up each round keeps a rooting interest in every game while saving the bigger money for the games everyone actually watches. Here's one worked example on a board of 100 squares at $10 each, with the full $1,000 going back out as prizes.

The rounds add up to exactly $1,000. Every game before the title game pays the final score only, which keeps each of those 62 prizes simple to track, and every round through the Final Four pays the same $160. The last $200 rides on the championship, split between halftime, the final and the reverse score rule, which also pays whoever holds the digits flipped at halftime and at the final. In 2026 that would have sent the $50 reverse final prize to the same Michigan 3, UConn 9 square that won at halftime, which is the kind of night people still bring up a year later.

None of these numbers are the right ones, and no split is fairer than another, because every square had the same chance before the draw. Heavier late prizes make the Final Four more exciting and produce fewer winners, while flatter prizes spread the money across more people. Whichever you choose, write the prizes as actual dollar figures, publish the table before squares go on sale, and don't change it once anyone has paid. A multi-week board also justifies a higher square price than a single game, since one square buys three weeks of games. If part of the money is going to a team or a cause, our guide to running a March Madness squares fundraiser walks through pricing the board from your goal.

On a board that pays only the final score, about half of the 100 squares win nothing all tournament, while adding halftime prizes lifts that to roughly three squares in four winning at least once.

We scored every tournament from 2022 to 2026 against a single board. Paying the final score of all 63 games, only 45 to 51 of the 100 squares won anything in a given year, because 63 prizes landing at random on 100 squares keeps hitting some squares twice and missing others completely. Paying halftime as well doubled the prizes to 126 and lifted the number of squares that won at least once to between 70 and 75. The most any single square won in one tournament was six prizes, which happened in 2022, 2023 and 2026.

That matters more for a tournament board than for a single game, because your players are signing up for three weeks of games rather than one evening. If a player buys three squares on a final-only board, there's a real chance none of them pays all month, and that's the person who doesn't join next year. Halftime prizes, even small ones in the early rounds, are the cheapest way to put more people on the winners list. The trade-off is that each prize gets smaller, so it's a choice between more winners and bigger wins rather than a right answer.

Barely, since basketball scores spread their last digits across all ten numbers far more evenly than football scores do.

Across the 630 halftime and final prizes in our five tournaments, the busiest square was a 6 for the home team against a 7 for the away team, and it paid 14 times, about 2.2% of all prizes. Every one of the 100 squares paid at least once. Compare that with football, where our football squares odds data shows the most common NFL pairing, a 7 against a 0, winning around 7% of the time pooled across every quarter, more than three times the busiest basketball square. Here is how often each last digit showed up on a team's score.

A perfectly even spread would put every digit at 10%, and most of them sit within a couple of points of that. The low count for 4 on the final is the kind of gap a sample this size throws up by chance, so we wouldn't expect it to repeat next March. The one pattern with a real reason behind it is that squares where both digits match, like a 7 against a 7, came up about 30% less often on the final than the average square, because a final can never be tied and those squares only pay when a team wins by exactly 10, 20 or 30.

None of this changes how you play, because the digits are randomized after every square is claimed and nobody gets to choose them. It is useful when you're explaining the board to a skeptical coworker, though, since the honest answer to "did I get bad numbers" in March is almost always no.

Overtime points count toward the final score, a tie at halftime just pays the square where both digits match, and unsold squares are best handled by filling the board before the draw.

Thirteen of our 315 tournament games went to overtime, a little over 4%, so on a 63-game board you should expect two or three. The standard rule pays the final prize on the true final score, whenever the game ends, and that's how a Play Squares board scores it automatically. A host who'd rather pay the end of regulation can do that too, as long as the rule is written down before the draw.

Halftime ties happen more than people expect, with six in our sample, and they need no special rule. A 30-30 halftime simply pays the square where a 0 meets a 0, the same as any other score.

Unsold squares are the problem worth planning for, since a board that pays 63 games will land plenty of prizes on any empty square. The cleanest fix is to fill the board, with the host or the players buying the remaining squares at the price everyone else paid. If that isn't possible, the best fallback is to roll an unclaimed game's prize into the next game on the board, which works especially well over a tournament because there's always another game coming. The one gap is the title game, so decide in advance whether an empty square there gets its prize split across the squares that were claimed or paid to a randomly drawn square. A written next-square-up rule, or spreading the money across the other prizes that do have winners, are both fine alternatives. What never works is shrinking the prizes after people have paid for them. Our article on football squares payouts covers each option in more detail, and every one of them carries over to basketball unchanged.

On Play Squares you create one March Madness board, add the tournament games you want it to cover, set a halftime and final prize for each game, and share a single link with your group.

Players open the link or scan the QR code, tap the squares they want and enter a name and email, with no account to set up. When the board is full, the digits are randomized once and locked for the tournament. From then on the board follows the live score of every game it covers, works out the halftime and final winners automatically, and keeps a prize table grouped by round so anyone can see who has won what so far. While a half is still being played, it highlights the square that's on track to win if the score holds, which is the part people end up refreshing all afternoon on the first Thursday.

The best part for a host is how quiet it is. With 63 games over three weeks, a paper sheet means fielding "did I win anything" texts after every game, while one shared board lets every player check their own squares whenever they like. Our March Madness squares page shows what the board looks like, and once the nets come down, the same format carries straight over to an NBA playoff series squares pool.