How to Run a March Madness Pool: Format, Rules and Prizes for 2027

Run a bracket if your group follows college basketball, run a squares pool if most of them don't, and run both if you have some of each, which is what most offices actually look like. Those two formats cover nearly every group, and survivor pools and team drafts work well as a second game for the fans who want more.

The last column is the one hosts forget to think about. A bracket rewards knowing which 12 seed is dangerous, so the person who filled theirs out by team colors usually knows they're finished before the first weekend ends. That's fine in a room of basketball fans, and it's a problem in an office where half the people joined to be polite. The format you pick decides how many of your players still care on the night of the title game.

How much patience your group has matters too. A bracket takes each player twenty minutes in one sitting and then nothing, while a survivor pool asks for a decision on every game day and quietly loses anyone who forgets. A draft is the most fun format in the room and the hardest one to schedule, since it needs everyone together in the few days after the bracket comes out.

Open bracket entries on Selection Sunday, March 14, and lock them just before the first Round of 64 game on Thursday, March 18, while a squares board can start selling weeks earlier because nobody needs the bracket to claim a square.

The 2027 tournament changes one thing that matters to every host. The field grows from 68 teams to 76, and the old four-game First Four becomes a 12-game Opening Round on March 16 and 17. That means 12 of the 64 spots on the bracket will still be undecided when it comes out on Sunday night, compared with four in past years. Your players will be picking around a dozen blank lines if you make them finish on Monday.

Our advice is to leave the Opening Round out of the scoring and hold the lock until Thursday. Everyone then picks from the same 64 teams, and a bracket still has the usual 63 games. Your deadline has to be a real time rather than "Thursday", so check when the first game tips and pick a moment before it. If you're using a bracket app, it may lock on its own schedule, and that time is the one to give your players.

Thursday is also a hard stop for a squares board. The digits get randomized once after the board fills, and that draw has to happen before the first game the board pays. Once it does, the board locks with no new entries, swaps or changed claims, because anyone joining after the numbers are out would be choosing a winner instead of taking their chances with everyone else.

Most pools double the points every round, so a correct pick is worth 1 point in the Round of 64 and 32 in the title game, and that works well as long as you know what it does to your standings.

Under doubling, every round is worth the same 32 points, which sounds balanced until you add up the champion. A team that wins six games earns you 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 points, so that one pick is worth 63 of the 192 points available, about a third of the whole bracket. If your champion loses on the first Saturday, you've lost most of that in one afternoon, which is why so many players check out early. The flatter 1-2-3-4-5-6 system drops the champion to 21 of 120 points, under a fifth, so a player who misses on their title pick can still climb back.

Neither one is more correct than the other. Doubling gives you a bigger finish and a tighter race among the people who called the final, and flatter scoring keeps more players in it for longer. Some hosts add an upset bonus, usually the winning team's seed or the seed difference between the two teams, and that rewards the player who took a 13 seed. It also makes standings harder to check by hand, so only add it if an app is doing the math for you.

The tiebreaker needs the same care, because two brackets finishing level is common in a small pool. Ask every player to guess the total points in the title game, and write down that the closest guess wins whether it's over or under. The 2026 final finished 69-63, a total of 132, so a guess of 130 would have beaten a guess of 135. If two guesses are equally close, split the prize, and say so in the rules before anyone enters.

In a survivor pool, every player picks one team on each game day, stays alive if that team wins, and can't use the same team twice for the rest of the tournament.

The men's tournament has ten game days from the Round of 64 to the title game, and the fun comes from rationing. Spending a 1 seed on the first Thursday makes that day safe and leaves you short in the Sweet 16, when the easy games are gone. Many hosts ask for two picks per day on the first Thursday and Friday so that one upset doesn't end half the pool before lunch, and that's a sensible change if you have a big group.

Three rules need to be in writing before the first pick. Decide what happens to a player who forgets to pick, and the simple answer is that they're out. Decide what happens if everyone still alive loses on the same day, and the usual fix is to split the prize among them. Then decide what happens if a player runs out of teams, since only four teams are left at the Final Four and your last survivors may have used them all. Most survivor pools end before the title game, so tell your players that up front, and don't promise a date for the final payout.

A squares board gives a March Madness office pool the thing brackets can't, which is a reason for every player to care about every game right up to the title game, whichever teams have lost.

A squares pool, sometimes called a box pool or block pool, uses one 10x10 board for the whole tournament. Players claim squares while the grid is blank, the digits 0 to 9 are randomized once, and each game pays the square matching the last digit of each team's score. Nobody can be knocked out, and basketball knowledge is worth nothing, which makes it the format your least interested coworker will happily join. We scored the last five tournaments against a single board, and paying halftime plus the final put between 70 and 75 of the 100 squares on the winners list. Paying the final alone left it between 45 and 51. Our walkthrough of how March Madness squares work has the full mechanics, the round-by-round prize table and those numbers in detail.

Keep it to one board for the whole tournament, with one payment collection and one draw. Running a fresh board for each game or each day throws away the reason the format is easy, since a single draw carries every game from the first Thursday to April 5. A paper board works too, and our March Madness squares template prints one with your prizes for each round on the sheet.

Set an entry fee that everyone in the group can pay without thinking twice, then turn the total into dollar prizes as soon as entries close, and publish them before the first game.

There's no standard price, so $5, $10, $20 and $25 are all reasonable places to start, and the right one depends on who's playing. A higher entry fee makes the prizes more exciting, but a pool at work only stays fun if nobody feels awkward about joining, and the person who sits out over the price is usually the one you were hoping to include.

Here's one worked example for an office. Twenty-four people each pay $10 for one bracket, which makes a $240 prize pool. You could pay $150 for first place, $60 for second, $20 for third and $10 for last, which hands the worst bracket in the building its entry back and gives somebody a reason to enjoy a terrible Sweet 16. Run a squares board next to it at $5 a square, and 100 squares make a $500 prize pool, so you can halve every figure in the prize table in our squares walkthrough and pay out every round from there. Keep the two prize pools separate so a dispute about one never touches the other.

Bigger prizes at the top create more excitement and fewer winners, and a flatter split sends the money to more people, so the choice is about what your group will enjoy and neither is fairer. If you allow more than one bracket per person, every entry should pay the same fee. If you're running this for a team or a good cause rather than for fun at work, the numbers change, and our guide to a March Madness squares fundraiser prices the board from your goal instead.

Collect money digitally, keep one central record of who has paid, and make the rule plain from the first message: an entry counts only once it's paid.

Set your payment deadline for Wednesday night, a day ahead of the lock, so you have a morning left to chase the two people who said they'd send it later. Venmo, Cash App, PayPal and Zelle all do the job, and what matters is that one person holds one list. The host's biggest headache in any pool is a late payer whose bracket is suddenly doing well, and "no payment, no entry" settles that before it can start. For a squares board, track how many squares each person has paid for rather than which squares, since positions can change until the numbers are drawn.

Send the full rules in one message before you take any money, covering the format, the deadline, the scoring, the tiebreaker, the prizes and how they're paid. Decide everything in advance and don't change any of it once the tournament starts, even if everyone seems to agree, because the person who'd lose out rarely says so in the group chat. After the title game, confirm the final standings, give people a day to raise a mistake, and pay the winners that week, since a slow payout is what people remember when you ask them to join next year.

Give busted players something new to play for, because the first weekend alone holds 48 of the 63 games and your standings can harden into a two-person race long before the Final Four.

The easiest fix is a second-chance bracket. Open a new, smaller entry on Sunday night, March 21, when the Sweet 16 is set, lock it before the first game on March 25, and charge a few dollars for a fresh 15-game bracket. People who were eliminated by a Thursday upset get a clean restart, and it costs you about ten minutes. Set aside a small prize or two from the start as well, such as the best first weekend, the most correct upsets, or that last-place refund, so a player near the bottom still has something to chase.

A short update after each round does more than you'd expect. Post the top five, the biggest climber and anyone who still has a live champion, and keep it to a few lines so people read it. Hosts who send one message a round tend to have a full pool the next year, because the group feels like a game instead of a form they filled out in March.

This is also where a squares board earns its place. If your office's brackets are all dead by the second Saturday, the board still has a winner in every remaining game, and the people who gave up on their picks are still checking it.

Play Squares runs the squares side of a March Madness pool, so you create one board, add the tournament games, set your prizes and share one link with the group. It doesn't run brackets, which you can host on any bracket site alongside it.

Players open the link or scan the QR code, tap their squares, and enter a name and email with no account to set up. When the board fills, the digits are randomized once and locked. From then on the board follows the live score of each game, works out the halftime and final winners, and keeps a prize table grouped by round. While a half is being played it shows the pending winner, the square on track to win if the score holds, so your players can check the board themselves rather than texting you to ask who won last night. You keep your own record of who has paid on the board, and the money moves directly between you and your players.

Everything you've written down in this article still applies: the deadline, the prizes and the rule that nothing changes once the numbers are drawn. Our March Madness squares page shows what the board looks like, and if your group wants another pool before March, the same setup works for Super Bowl squares in February.