Super Bowl Pool Ideas: Nine Pools and How Each One Pays

Nine Super Bowl pool ideas are worth running, and seven of them start from the same thing, a squares board where every square is claimed before anyone knows which digits it will carry.

The difference between the squares pools is how often they pay and how much work they ask of whoever runs them, while the two pools without a board swap pure chance for a little football knowledge. The table sorts all nine by what triggers a prize, whether that prize replaces the usual quarter prizes or sits alongside them, and how much a player needs to know about football to enjoy it.

Reverse score, plus-score and touching squares share a row because they work the same way, as small extra prizes bolted onto a classic board, which is why the list counts nine ideas across seven rows. The one thing every pool here has in common is that the prizes are decided and written down before the first dollar changes hands, because a rule invented in the fourth quarter always looks like it was invented to help somebody.

The classic Super Bowl squares pool pays four prizes, one at the end of each quarter, to the square where the last digit of each team's score crosses on the board.

Players claim squares on a 10 by 10 grid, with the home team along the top and the away team down the left, and only once all 100 are claimed does the host randomize the digits 0 through 9 onto each side. Nobody can pick a lucky number, because the numbers don't exist until the board is full. Some groups call this a block pool or a box pool, and our Super Bowl block pool explainer shows it's the same game under another name.

Here's how the money works on a real example. At $5 a square, a full board collects $500, and a common split pays $100 at the end of the first quarter, $100 at halftime, $100 at the end of the third quarter and $200 for the last prize. No split is fairer than another, since every square had the same chance before the draw, so the choice is only about taste: weight more toward the end for one big moment, or spread it evenly so more people take something home. Decide now whether the last prize means the final score including overtime or the score at the end of regulation, and write it down. Our guide to Super Bowl squares payouts works through other splits and board prices in detail.

A 25-square board suits a small group best, because it has a quarter as many squares to fill as a 100-square board while keeping the same four quarter prizes and the same rules.

On a 5 by 5 board each side gets five slots, and each slot holds two digits, so one square covers four of the hundred possible last-digit pairs. That's the part newer players find confusing, so spell it out when you share the board: if your column carries 3 and 8 and your row carries 0 and 7, you win on a 3-0, 3-7, 8-0 or 8-7 finish to any quarter. A family of eight or a group of friends around one TV can fill it in a few minutes, where the same crowd on a 100-square board would each need a dozen squares.

Two even smaller formats work for a tiny group or a kids' board. The 10-square pool isn't a grid at all but a single strip of ten boxes, one digit each, and the winner is the last digit of both scores added together, so a 17 to 14 quarter sums to 31 and the box marked 1 wins. The 4-square board splits the digits into two groups of five on each side, so every square covers 25 of the hundred pairs and every quarter has a very good chance of paying somebody new. Our breakdown of how many squares are in a football pool compares all four sizes side by side.

A score-change pool and a pay-per-minute pool both pay far more than four winners, and both replace the quarter prizes entirely rather than adding to them.

In a score-change pool, the square matching the new last digits collects every time the scoreboard moves. It's the best cure there is for a blowout, since a late touchdown in a game that was decided an hour ago still pays somebody in the room. The catch is that nobody knows how many times the score will change, so the per-change prize needs a cap. On a $500 board, pay $20 a change up to $300 in total, and once a wild game reaches that cap either lower the amount for the rest of the night or stop paying per change and let the rest ride. Whatever the score changes don't use goes to the last prize, which means the last prize isn't a fixed figure here and nobody knows it until the game ends.

Here's how that plays out on Super Bowl LI, the first Super Bowl to go to overtime, with Atlanta as the home team and every square written as Atlanta's digit then New England's.

Every extra point and two-point try moves the score, so each touchdown usually pays twice: once for the six points and again for the try. That gave this game 16 changes, and at $20 each the two-point conversion that tied it at 28 was the 15th change and used up the whole $300 cap. Under a stop-paying rule the overtime touchdown paid nothing as a change, and the $200 left over went to the 8 against 4 square as the last prize. The 8 against 8 square collected twice, at 28 to 18 and again at 28 to 28, while James White's missed extra point in the third quarter paid nobody, because a missed kick doesn't change the score. A game this wild is exactly why the cap has to be written down before kickoff.

A pay-per-minute pool pays whoever holds the square matching the score as each minute of game clock runs out, and it divides neatly because regulation is always 60 minutes. On the same $500 board, $7 a minute uses $420 and leaves $80 for the last prize. It rewards the square that sits on a score for a long stretch, as the same game shows.

A scoreless first quarter and a slow start to the second left 0 to 0 on the board for 17 minutes, so one square took $119, more than the first-quarter prize on a classic board, while the 28 to 28 tie that forced overtime paid for a single minute. Both of these pools need a written overtime rule: decide whether overtime minutes pay extra, pay nothing, or simply count toward the last prize. The tables above count the overtime score toward the last prize, which is why it goes to 8 against 4 rather than the 8 against 8 square that held the score at the end of regulation. Our full breakdown of football squares payouts runs both formats on a larger board.

The reverse score rule, the plus-score rule and touching squares are the three add-ons worth using, and unlike the formats above they run alongside the four quarter prizes instead of replacing them.

The reverse score rule pays a second, smaller prize to the square with the winning digits swapped, so a quarter ending 17 to 10 pays the 7 against 0 square its full prize and the 0 against 7 square a reverse prize. On the $500 board, trimming each quarter prize by $20 funds a $20 reverse prize for every quarter and doubles the number of people who win something. When a quarter ends with both digits the same, say 14 to 14, the forward and reverse squares are one and the same, so write down in advance whether that square collects both prizes or the reverse prize rolls into the next quarter.

The final row is the board above. The halftime row is the tie case: under a both-prizes rule the 7 against 7 square takes $100, and under a roll-over rule it takes $80 and the third quarter's reverse prize grows to $40.

The plus-score rule adds a fixed amount, usually 5, to both teams' scores at the end of each quarter and pays a second, smaller prize to the square those new digits land on. A quarter ending 17 to 10 pays the 7 against 0 square as normal, then reads as 22 to 15 and pays the 2 against 5 square as well. It exists for the players stuck with digits like 2, 5 and 9, which rarely come up at the end of a quarter. Adding 5 pairs every digit with another, 0 with 5, 7 with 2, 3 with 8, 4 with 9 and 1 with 6, so whenever the common digits hit, the square holding their partners wins something too.

Funded the same way as the reverse prize, by trimming $20 from each quarter prize on the $500 board, it plays out like this across the same game as the reverse table above, with the main prizes paying $80, $80, $80 and $180.

Because 5 is added to both scores, both digits always change, so the plus-score square can never be the same square as the quarter winner. It can land on the reverse square, though, if you run both add-ons: whenever the two digits are 5 apart, as in a 17 to 12 quarter, the reverse square and the plus-score square are both 2 against 7, so write down whether that square collects both prizes. Some groups add 3 or 7 instead of 5, which works just as well as long as the number is written down before the board locks.

Touching squares pays a small amount to every square next to each quarter winner. Set it up so the grid wraps at the edges, with the top row treating the bottom row as a neighbour and the last column treating the first as one, which gives every square exactly eight neighbours and an equal shot. At $2 a neighbour across four quarters, that's $64 of the prize pool paying up to 32 extra small prizes, which keeps most of the room cheering at every quarter break.

That's the simple case. When the winner sits on the edge of the board, some of its neighbours are off the grid, and that's what the wrap rule is for. Here's the hardest case, a winner in the corner.

The corner is where touching squares goes wrong without a written rule. On a board that doesn't wrap, a corner winner has only three neighbours and an edge winner five, against eight for a square in the middle, so the players holding edge squares quietly get fewer chances than everyone else. Settle two more cases in advance: whether a player who owns both the winner and a touching square collects both, and what happens to a touching prize that lands on an unclaimed square, which should follow the same rule as any other unclaimed square. Both add-ons are covered in more depth in our Super Bowl squares rules.

A touchdown-scorer draft and a final-score pool are the two Super Bowl pools that don't need a board, and both give the fans in your group a pool where knowing the teams actually helps.

For a touchdown-scorer draft, write every player who might plausibly score on slips of paper, draw a random order, and let players take turns drafting in a snake order, where the last pick of one round takes the first pick of the next. Include each team's defense and special teams as a single pick, since return and defensive touchdowns happen. With ten people at $10 each, a clean split pays $30 to whoever drafted the first touchdown scorer and $70 to whoever's players scored the most touchdowns across the game, with ties splitting the prize. Decide before the draft whether a quarterback only counts for rushing touchdowns, which is the usual rule, or for passing touchdowns too.

Two written rules decided that game. Robert Alford's interception return counted for whoever took Atlanta's defense and special teams, and James White's third touchdown came in overtime. If overtime hadn't counted, Mia would have tied Sarah and Alex on two touchdowns each and the $70 would have split three ways. And under the rushing-only rule, whoever drafted Tom Brady scored nothing despite his two touchdown passes.

A final-score pool is the simplest thing on this list. Everybody writes down one exact final score before kickoff, no two people can claim the same score, and the closest guess wins, measured by adding up how far off each team's number was. Tie-breakers matter because two guesses often land the same distance away, so settle it in advance, with the guess that picked the right winner taking it and an even split after that.

Ben and Mia both finished 7 points off, but only Ben had New England winning, so the tie-breaker hands him the pot. Write down whether the final score includes overtime too: stop at regulation's 28 to 28 and Mia's 31 to 30 would have been closer. If your group wants more questions than one final score, the pregame prediction card in our list of Super Bowl party games turns this into a full sheet, which some groups call a prop sheet.

An office or a mixed party suits a classic board at a low price, a group of die-hard fans suits a score-change pool or a draft on top, and a fundraiser suits a classic board priced from the amount you want to raise.

An office Super Bowl pool has to work for people who never watch football and people who work remotely, which points straight at a classic 100-square board shared online. According to our data, the most common Super Bowl square prices are $1, $2, $5 and $10, and the lower end of that range is where an office board fills fastest. Check your employer's policy before you send the link around. At a house party, the same classic board works, with the reverse score rule added if you want more cheering, while a group of fans who already know every roster will enjoy a score-change pool or a touchdown-scorer draft running alongside it.

For a fundraiser, most hosts keep about half of what's collected for the cause and pay the rest out as prizes, so divide your goal by 50 to find the price per square on a 100-square board: raising $1,000 for a youth team means $20 a square. Whatever the group, the board above shows the problem every pool has to plan for, blank squares nobody claimed. The cleanest fix is filling the board, with the host or the players between them claiming what's left at the same price, and if that isn't possible the host covers the difference so the advertised prizes still land. Our walkthrough of running a Super Bowl squares fundraiser covers pricing and selling in more detail.

You run a Super Bowl pool smoothly by settling every rule before anyone pays and putting the board where every player can check it for themselves. Before the first square is claimed, write down these five things and share them with the group:

1. The price per square and the size of the board.
2. Every prize as a dollar figure, including any add-ons.
3. Whether the last prize includes overtime or stops at regulation.
4. What happens to squares that nobody claims.
5. When the numbers get randomized and the board locks.

The rest of the work happens during the game, and that's where most hosts end up answering the same question twenty times. With a Super Bowl pool on Play Squares, players claim their own squares from a link, the digits get randomized once the board is full, and the board follows the score live, highlighting the square that's on track to win the quarter still being played as well as the winners already settled. Everybody checks the board on their own phone instead of texting you to ask whether their square just hit. The four quarter prizes are built in, and you can add your own custom and bonus prizes for the add-ons above, so the same board handles a classic pool or one with a reverse score prize on top.

The Super Bowl squares page shows the live board in action, and our guide on how to make Super Bowl squares walks through setting one up step by step. Whichever of these Super Bowl pool ideas you run on Play Squares, pick it early, price it for your crowd, and get the board filled well before kickoff.