FAQ

Yes. No host fee, no charge per grid, no premium tier gating the basics. The paid squares platforms charge around $13 a grid; we don't.

You sign in once, when you commit your squares. On a public pool you can browse the grid and pencil in your picks first — the sign-in only comes when you tap Claim, and your picks carry through it. Signing in is what lets the app play under the name you choose, remember your pools, and tell you when you win.

A public pool's grid is visible to anyone with the link — they can watch, and claiming a square joins them automatically. A private pool is hidden: there's no spectating, so people join through an invite link the admin shares. Either way, the money and activity history stay visible to members only.

Pro and college football, and pro and college basketball — the NFL, NCAA football, the NBA, the WNBA, and both men's and women's college basketball. Pick the game from a live schedule and the teams and start time fill themselves in. You can also run a pool on any game at all — a backyard game, a high-school rivalry, a sport we don't list — by choosing the manual option and entering the scores yourself. The squares math is the same either way: two running scores, two last digits, one winning square.

By default there's no limit — one person could take the whole grid if it's open. If you'd rather spread it around, the admin can set a per-player cap when creating the pool, and the grid stops anyone from claiming past it.

At random, and only after the grid is locked — so claiming happens before anyone knows which numbers go where. Nobody can pick statistically good squares, because the good squares don't exist yet when you claim. The admin can let the app draw or enter the numbers by hand.

Locking is what freezes the grid so the numbers can be drawn — the admin does it once claiming is done. If the admin set a claim deadline, new claims stop the moment it passes even before the lock; otherwise squares stay open until the admin locks. Once it's locked, the grid is set: no new claims, and the numbers get drawn.

Some, not all. The buy-in price and currency freeze as soon as the first square is claimed (changing what people owe mid-pool isn't fair), and the league is fixed when the pool is created. After lock you can still rename the pool, fix team names, change when it auto-archives, and flip the autopilot and results-email switches — but the money and structure stay put.

Two optional twists the admin can turn on at setup. Reverse winners pay a second share each period to the mirror-image square — your two digits swapped — on top of the normal winner. “Fresh numbers each period” (a redraw pool) shuffles a new set of row and column numbers for every scoring period instead of using one set for the whole game. Most pools use neither; they're there if your group likes them.

For games with a live feed, scores fill in automatically and the winning square lights up at the end of each scoring period. The admin can always enter or fix a score by hand, and a pool with no feed at all — a backyard or high-school game — works exactly the same way manually. The game never stalls waiting on a feed.

The admin just re-enters it. A corrected score supersedes the old one, the winning square updates to match, and the change is recorded — nothing is stuck once it's been entered. Payouts aren't final until the admin finalizes the pool at the end, so a mid-game fix costs nothing.

The pool never depends on the feed to keep going. The admin can enter every score by hand at any time — the same way a no-feed pool already works — so a flaky or missing feed is a convenience lost, not a blocker. If a pool is on autopilot and the feed stalls at a period boundary, the app pings the admin to enter that score rather than silently waiting.

Optionally. Autopilot has four independent switches, all off by default: lock at the deadline, draw right after lock, auto-accept each period's result a few minutes after it's final, and finalize when the game ends. You can turn on any combination — or none, and run everything by hand. One thing is never automated: sending the results email is always a deliberate human action.

It sticks around as a read-only record — a trophy room you can revisit. A finished pool tidies itself into your Past pools after a while (the admin picks how long, a week by default), but it never disappears; you and the members can always come back and look at the final grid.

Never. It's a tracker, not a wallet — you settle with each other directly (Venmo, Cash App, cash, whatever), and the app just keeps a clear record of who owes what and who's paid. Holding pool money is something we deliberately never do.

The app is the scorekeeper for the money, not the bank. Everyone settles directly — Venmo, Cash App, cash, whatever your group uses — and the admin marks each person paid as it happens. At any moment the pool shows who still owes their buy-in and who's owed a payout, so nothing gets lost track of, and no money ever passes through us.

They solve two different problems, so it’s worth knowing which you want. Forgive clears what someone owes but leaves them in the pool — their square stays theirs and can still win. That’s the one to use when the buy-in got handled some other way (someone covered their square). Remove takes the person out entirely: their squares go back to the pool as house squares and any unpaid buy-in is written off (see what happens to a square when someone leaves). Reach for Remove when someone’s actually out; reach for Forgive when only the money needs sorting.

Yes — forgiving is only about the money. The square is still theirs, so if it hits, they’re owed the payout. If you want someone to stop being eligible, remove them from the pool instead, which returns their squares to the house.

Their own squares become house squares — back in the pool, owned by no one. A square someone gifted them instead returns to whoever gave it, as long as that person is still in the pool. Any unpaid buy-in of theirs is written off, and if they'd already paid, that money is recorded as owed back to them. Every bit of this shows in the pool's history.

A member can hand one of their own squares to another member with the buy-in already covered — the giver keeps paying for it, the receiver owes nothing. It stays linked to the giver: if the receiver later leaves, the square goes back to the giver rather than to the house.

What was sold. The pot is the number of claimed squares times the buy-in, fixed when the grid locks — not the cash collected so far. That's why a period's payout is known even if a few people haven't paid yet, and why forgiving or reassigning a square adjusts the pot in a way the app shows you at the time. Unsold squares are house squares and add nothing to the pot.

The pot is divided across the game's scoring periods, and the admin sets how. “Even” splits it equally; “Default” gives every period an equal share with a bigger final period (the classic 20/20/20/40 across a football game's quarters, or 33/67 across two halves); or the admin can set a custom percentage for each period, as long as they add up to 100. Whenever a split doesn't divide into whole cents, the leftover cent goes to the final period — so the numbers always add up exactly to the pot, with nothing lost or invented.

Yes. The admin can add co-admins, who handle the game-day work — locking, drawing, entering scores, marking people paid. What stays with the one admin is membership and money settings: adding or removing people, changing the buy-in, and handing off the pool. Every pool has exactly one admin.

Promote another member to admin. That one step seats them as the new admin and steps you down to co-admin — a pool always has exactly one admin, so it swaps rather than duplicates. It’s also why the sole admin can’t just leave a pool: hand it off first (or cancel it), so the pool is never left with no one running it.

Cancel calls off a real pool that’s underway: it’s voided completely — every collected buy-in is recorded as owed back, and no payouts stand, whatever the game did. Use it when a pool with people and money in it isn’t happening. Delete is for a pool with nothing in it yet — no claimed squares, nobody but you — so there’s nothing to unwind; it just clears a pool you made by mistake so you can start over. The settings page offers whichever one fits, never both, and both ask you to confirm.

A private pool has no spectating, so people can’t just find it and claim in. Instead the admin shares an invite link — whoever opens it signs in and becomes a player. There’s one invite link per pool, and the admin can rotate it anytime: regenerating the link instantly kills the old one, so a link that’s gotten around can be cut off.

Yes. When you claim your first square you're asked what to call you, prefilled with the name on your account — change it if your friends know you by something else, or leave it as is. Hiding your account name from other players is a separate checkbox, so you can have a better name without hiding anything. Hiding is a display choice, not a privacy guarantee: admins (who handle the money) and you always see the real name, and a name that showed before you hid it can't be un-shown.

Members and the admin. The money view — who owes, who's owed, who's paid — is visible to people in the pool, never to an anonymous link-visitor. Marking people paid, forgiving buy-ins, and recording payouts are admin and co-admin actions.

No. The only email we ever send is the final results, and only if the admin turns that on. Everything else — you won a period, you owe a buy-in, the numbers were drawn — is an in-app or push notification, and you control which of those you get.