The five pool formats
Beat the Spread, Pick'em, Confidence, Survivor and Playoff — what each one asks of you.
Which format is my pool?
Look at how the pool asks you to pick: a number beside each team is Beat the Spread, a Confidence Ranking panel is Confidence, one team for the whole week is Survivor, a ranked list of playoff teams is Playoff, and a plain winner in every game is Pick'em.
All five formats work off the same schedule of real games. What changes is how many teams you pick, what a correct pick is worth, and whether a bad week can end your run.
Settings has a Pool Format card under Rules & Scoring, but it prints Unknown Format in Confidence and Playoff pools. The picks screen is the signal to trust.
Beat the Spread
You pick one team in every game of the week and each pick is graded against that team's spread, so one correct pick is worth one point and the standings column reads Wins.
Each game shows both teams with a small number beside them — the spread. Pick either side of every game. The pick saves the moment you tap it, and each game closes at its own kickoff.
A point is earned by adding your team's own spread to its final score. If that total beats the other team's score, the pick is correct and earns one point. This is why a pick can win while the team loses, and lose while it wins.
- An exact push goes to the underdog: the side with the plus number takes the point and the favourite's backers lose it.
- A game that finishes with no spread ever posted is graded straight up, and only a genuine tie is a push.
- Every correct pick is worth the same single point, whichever game it was in.
Nobody is eliminated. Every member picks every week the pool covers, each week is decided on its own, and the final standings decide the champion. Beat the Spread is also the format the create page starts on.
Pick'em Pool
You pick the team you think wins each game outright, with no spread anywhere on the screen, and every correct pick is worth one point under a standings column reading Wins.
The board is the same one Beat the Spread uses with the number taken away. One team per game, straight up, saved as you tap, and each game closes at its own kickoff.
A point is earned when the team you picked wins the game. The margin is irrelevant: a one-point win and a forty-point win are both worth one point, and there is no line to beat.
A tied game is a push for both sides. Neither pick is correct and neither scores, but it still counts as a pick you made, so a tie never shows up as a missed pick in your progress. Tied games are rare.
Nobody is eliminated. Every member picks every week the pool covers, each week is decided on its own, and the final standings decide the champion.
Confidence Pool
You pick a straight-up winner in every game and then rank those picks, a correct pick earns the value its position gives it, and nothing is saved until you press Submit Picks.
There are two steps each week. Pick a winner in every game, then put those picks in order in the Confidence Ranking panel, most confident at the top. The panel hands the top row the highest value and works down from there, so you never type a number.
The values come from that week's game count. A sixteen-game week uses every value from 1 to 16 exactly once — no duplicates and no gaps — and the whole week is saved as one submission. A correct pick earns its own value and a wrong pick earns nothing, which is why the standings column reads Points rather than Wins.
Confidence is the one format that does not save as you go. Picks sit in your browser until you press Submit Picks, and the counter at the top of the page counts those unsaved picks, so a week can look finished while nothing has been stored. If a game kicks off with no pick on it, that week can no longer be submitted at all.
Games that have already started keep the team and value you submitted for them, and both have to go back in unchanged when you resubmit the week. Quick Pick is not offered in a Confidence pool, because it saves game by game.
Nobody is eliminated. Every member ranks every week the pool covers, each week is decided on its own, and the final standings decide the champion.
Survivor Pool
You pick one team a week to win outright, never the same team twice in a season, and a loss or a missed week costs a life until one member is left standing.
Survivor picks are not on the shared picks board. This format has two tabs of its own — Make Pick, at /pools/:id/survivor/pick, and Survivor Board, at /pools/:id/survivor — and they take the place of the Leaderboard and Weekly Standings tabs. Opening the ordinary picks page in a Survivor pool sends you to the Make Pick screen instead.
You choose one team for the whole week, straight up, from games that have not started. Each team can be used once per season: teams you have spent are struck through in the tray, and picking one again is refused with a message saying that team has already been used this season.
- Your team wins: you survive the week.
- Your team ties: you survive as well, and it costs nothing.
- Your team loses: you lose a life.
- The week closes with no pick from you: you lose a life.
The owner sets lives at 1, 2 or 3, and 1 — classic — is the default, so in most pools the first loss ends your run. The Survivor Board holds everything else: a member-by-week grid, your remaining lives, the elimination log, and the standings column labelled Weeks Survived.
The pool ends the moment one member is left, which can happen weeks before the schedule runs out. If everyone still in falls in the same week, that last group shares the title. If several are still alive when the season ends, the owner's setting decides between co-champions and a season tiebreaker.
If the owner set Missed pick to auto-pick, a sweep that runs about once an hour fills a missed week with the best unused favourite among games that have not kicked off. It is a safety net, not a guarantee — once every remaining game has started, or you have used every team, the week goes unfilled.
Survivor pools never pay a prize. The title is recorded with no award, and the SportBucks Planner section is hidden in a Survivor pool's settings.
Playoff Pool
A Playoff Pool is a companion pool spun off an existing pool: you rank all 14 playoff teams once before the postseason starts, then earn your rank's point value every time that team wins a playoff game.
A Playoff Pool never appears on the create page. The owner of an existing pool makes one from Settings, in the Playoff Pool section, and every active member of that pool is imported into it. There is one Playoff Pool per pool, and it has to be made before the first playoff game — after that the section reads Playoff Pool Unavailable.
There is nothing weekly to do. You open Rank Teams at /pools/:id/playoff-picks and put all 14 playoff teams in order, most confident first. The ranking has to cover every one of the 14 teams before it will save, and you can change the order until the playoffs start.
Each position carries a point value. The values step evenly down from the top rank's to the bottom rank's — the owner sets those two ends, and the defaults run 100 for your first team down to 25 for your fourteenth. You earn a team's value every time it wins a playoff game, so a first pick that goes all the way pays repeatedly while one that loses in the opening round pays nothing.
The standings column reads Points, and a Playoff Pool has no weekly winners at all. Rankings lock when the playoffs start: from then on Rank Teams redirects to the playoff leaderboard at /pools/:id/playoff-leaderboard and tells you picks are locked because the playoffs have started. The pool runs from there to a Playoff Champion.
Points are worked out from the pool's current settings rather than stored with your ranking, so an owner adjusting the top or bottom value never invalidates a ranking that has already been submitted.
Which formats you can create today
Each format has its own switch that only an admin can flip, so the create page and the live list below are the only accurate answer to what you can start right now.
Every format above exists in the app, but each one is switched on and off individually. A format that has not been switched on still appears on the create page as a card you cannot select, carrying a Coming Soon chip. Nothing a pool owner does changes that — it is an admin setting.
Switching a format off leaves pools that already use it alone. They keep running and keep scoring; the switch only decides whether a new pool can be started on that format.
Playoff Pool sits outside this entirely: it is never selectable on the create page whatever its switch says, because it is built from a pool you already own.
Whichever you pick, the format is chosen once. No screen lets you change it afterwards, so if you started the wrong one and nobody has played yet, delete the pool and create it again.
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