Super Bowl Squares Strategy: What Actually Changes Your Chances of Winning

There's a real strategy to Super Bowl squares, but it covers only three things you control: how many squares you hold, where those squares sit on the grid, and which board and rules you play under.

On a standard board you claim your squares first, and only once the whole grid is full does the host randomize the ten digits along the top and the ten down the side. At the moment you pick, every square is a blank box with exactly the same chance as the one beside it. Some boards let a big supporter or an early buyer choose their spot first, and that's fine, but going first doesn't help them either, since the digits that square will represent don't exist yet.

That rules out every tip built on choosing numbers. It doesn't rule out strategy, though, because squares that share a row also share a digit, and squares that share a digit tend to win together or not at all. So the shape of your squares matters even when the numbers are pure luck. The board you join matters too, since some formats pay out more often than others. The rest of this article walks through each of those, with the numbers we got from real games, so you can decide how you want to play instead of guessing.

The best numbers can't help you pick a square because the digits are assigned after you pick, so a chart of good and bad numbers tells you how lucky your draw was rather than what to choose.

Some digits really are much stronger than others. Pooling every scoring period across 1,424 NFL games from 2021 through 2025, a 7 for the home team against a 0 for the away team came up 424 times, a win rate of 7.33%, and the 2 against 2 square came up only twice. Scores move in field goals and touchdowns, so they keep landing on 0, 3, 4 and 7, and squares built from those digits win far more often than a 5 against an 8.

None of that changes what you should do before the draw, because the 7 against 0 square is just as likely to end up in any of the hundred boxes. Every square on a 100-square board has exactly a 1% chance of winning any single quarter before the numbers are randomized. Even after the draw, the best square in the game is still far more likely to lose than to win, so treat a strong pair as a nice bit of luck rather than a sure thing. If you want to see how good your digits are once you have them, the odds tool ranks all 100 pairings, and our piece on how to read football squares shows you how to find your own numbers on the grid.

Once the numbers are out, find your column's home digit and your row's away digit in the table below to see how often they've come up. Each figure is for the whole column or row, so a home 0 at about a quarter of all prizes means the ten squares under that 0 shared those wins between them. A single square only wins when both of its digits land at once, which is why even the best one wins far less often than either of its digits does.

Lucky numbers, birthdays and corner squares don't work, because they all try to choose something the random draw decides later, and corners are actually a slightly weaker shape than four squares spread across the board.

A birthday or a jersey number feels like a choice, but on a board where the digits are drawn after the squares are claimed, the box you mark has no number attached to it yet. Writing your name in the square you imagine will become a 7 is the same as writing it anywhere else. The only boards where choosing a number means anything are ones where the digits are printed in advance, and on those the first few players would grab every 0 and 7, which is exactly why hosts randomize.

Corners are a fun case, because they look spread out and aren't. The four corner squares sit in just two rows and two columns, so between them they only cover two home digits and two away digits. In our simulation four corner squares won at least one prize about 13.1% of the time, the same as a two by two block in the middle, while four squares in four different rows and columns won about 13.7% of the time. The gap is small, but it runs the opposite way from what most people expect.

You'll also find blog posts promising a pattern of squares that pays out more than it costs over the long run. No pattern can do that on a randomized board, because every square carries the same average share of the prize pool before the draw. Patterns change how your wins are bunched together, which the next two sections cover, but they never change the average.

Buying more squares improves your chances in a straight line, since each extra square adds the same slice of chance as the first one, and nothing about holding several squares makes any of them better.

Here's what that looks like on a 100-square board paying four prizes, at the end of the 1st quarter, at halftime, at the end of the 3rd quarter and on the final score with any overtime included. The middle column is your chance of winning at least one prize, and the last is how many prizes you'd collect on average per game. These figures assume your squares sit in different rows and columns, which the next section explains.

One square wins something about 3.5% of the time, a bit under the 4% you'd expect from four prizes at 1% each, because the same square sometimes wins twice in one game. That happened in 587 of the 1,424 games we checked, or 41% of them, which is why most hosts simply let a square win again rather than moving the prize, as our football squares rules explain.

The catch is that your cost climbs in a straight line too. Every square pays the same price and holds the same share of the prize pool on average, so ten squares give you ten times the chances for ten times the money, and the average return per square never moves. Buy as many squares as you're happy to spend on for a fun night, because that's the only thing the extra squares are really buying you.

Splitting squares with a friend works the same way. If two of you share the cost of four squares and agree to split anything they win, you each get half the chances for half the price, which is handy when the square price is a bit steep for one person. Just tell the host whose name goes on the board, so there's no argument at the end of a quarter about who was holding what.

Spread your squares out, one per row and one per column, if you want the best chance of winning at least one prize, and keep them together in a row or column only if you'd rather chase several prizes at once and accept a bigger chance of winning nothing.

Squares in the same row all carry the same away digit, so they live or die together. Scores stall for long stretches in football, and when a team sits on the same last digit for a quarter or two, the row or column holding that digit keeps winning while every other row keeps missing. Spread squares each cover a different home digit and a different away digit, so they give you more separate shots across the four scoring periods, even though your average number of prizes stays exactly the same.

Super Bowl LX shows both sides of this. New England didn't score until the 4th quarter, so the column under New England's 0 won the 1st quarter at 0 to 3, halftime at 0 to 9 and the 3rd quarter at 0 to 12. Whoever held that whole column took three prizes from a single game, then missed the final at 13 to 29. The ten spread squares on the same draw won only the final, which landed on 3 against 9.

One game proves very little on its own, so here is what happens over 1,424 of them. The two percentages in the last column compare your chance of winning two or more prizes in one game, spread squares first.

With a handful of squares the difference is small, around one percentage point, but with ten squares it grows to about six points, which is a big swing for something that costs you nothing. A tight two by two block sits in between, since it shares two digits on each axis. If the host assigns squares at random or you're handed whatever is left, there's nothing to do here, but whenever you get to choose your spots, pick a different row and a different column for every square you claim.

People often ask whether two boards on the same game beat one. We ran that too, and five spread squares on each of two boards won at least one prize about 31.0% of the time, against about 32.3% for ten spread squares on one board, so it barely matters. Join the second board if you like its people or its prizes, not for the math.

Boards that pay more prizes per game give every square more ways to win, and the reverse score rule is the biggest single boost, nearly doubling one square's chance of winning something.

Under the reverse score rule, a quarter pays the normal winner and also the square holding the same two digits flipped, so a 17 to 10 quarter pays 7 against 0 and 0 against 7. In our simulation, adding reverse prizes raised a single square's chance of winning at least once from about 3.5% to about 6.3%. Each prize is smaller, because the prize pool is split across more winners, but more people go home with something, and plenty of groups like it for exactly that reason.

Other formats work the same way. More scoring periods, extra prizes for squares touching the winner, or a board that pays every score change all hand out more prizes, each one smaller, while a board that saves most of the prize pool for the last prize gives fewer, bigger wins. Neither is better, and it's purely a question of whether you'd rather win small and often or chase one big prize. Our breakdown of the Super Bowl squares payout on every board size shows how the money moves under each structure.

Smaller boards follow the same logic. On a 25-square board each square covers four of the hundred possible score combinations, which works out to the same thing as holding a two by two block on a 100-square board, and each square usually costs more to match. You get fewer squares with more chance packed into each one, so a 25-square board suits a smaller group that wants every square to carry a real shot at a prize.

Once the numbers are drawn there's nothing left to decide, since the board locks with no new entries, no swapped squares and no changed claims, so your job is to find your digits and enjoy the game.

Locking the board is what keeps the game fair for everybody. Every square only has an equal shot before the numbers are assigned, so letting someone swap a weak square for a strong one afterwards would mean picking a winner after the fact. If anybody offers to trade squares once the digits are up, the host should say no, and a good host settles that rule before anyone claims a square.

What you can do is follow along without pestering the host. On a paper board that means writing your digits down and checking the score at every break, but an online board does it for you. Play Squares follows the score live, settles each quarter's winner the moment it ends, and in between shows the pending winner, meaning the square that would win if the score stayed where it is right now. You can watch your square light up as a drive heads for the end zone instead of texting the host to ask who's winning.

A host's strategy is to make every square equal and every rule known before the draw: fill the board, randomize the numbers only once it's full, and write down how ties, overtime and empty squares will be handled in advance.

Players can only trust the board if nobody could have known the digits early, so the draw should happen after the last square is claimed, in a way everyone can see. Letting players choose their own spots is a nice touch, and it's also what makes the spreading advice above possible, so it's worth allowing even though it doesn't change anyone's chances. Sign-ups can run right up to kickoff as long as the payments are in before the numbers are randomized.

Empty squares deserve a plan of their own. The cleanest fix is to fill the board, with the host or the players buying the remaining squares at the same price everyone else paid, so every prize lands on a real person and nobody's winnings shrink. Our Super Bowl squares rules cover overtime, empty squares and every other call worth making before the draw, and if you're starting from scratch, our walkthrough on how to make Super Bowl squares takes you from a blank board to paid winners.

Play your squares this Super Bowl by holding as many as you're happy to pay for, putting every one in its own row and column when you get the choice, and picking a board whose prizes suit how you like to win. That's the whole of a Super Bowl squares strategy that holds up against real data, and it fits in one sentence because the game is built on a fair, random draw.

Skip the birthday numbers, the lucky corners and the charts of best digits when you're claiming squares, since none of them can touch a draw that hasn't happened yet. Keep the charts for afterwards, when it's fun to know whether you landed a 7 against a 0 or a stubborn 2 against a 5. If you're hosting, the strategy is even simpler: a full board, a visible draw and rules written down before anyone pays. Our Super Bowl squares page shows how a Play Squares board handles the draw, the live score and the pending winner for your party, so everyone can check their own squares all night.