Scoring, standings and winners
How points add up, how the leaderboard sorts, and who takes a tied week.
How points work
Your standing is the sum of your pick points: one point per correct pick in Beat the Spread and Pick'em pools, the value you assigned to the pick in Confidence pools, and in a Survivor pool no points at all — only weeks survived.
Points are earned pick by pick and added into one running total, and that total is what your place is taken from. Record and accuracy are counted separately and keep counting correct picks, so in a Confidence pool a member with fewer correct picks than you can still sit above you.
Two scoring edges worth knowing. A correct Confidence pick that never got a value earns 0 and still counts as correct. A tied game in a Pick'em pool is a push: zero points for both sides, though it still counts as a pick you made.
Reading the leaderboard
The leaderboard ranks every member on that running total, marks your own row with a You chip, and re-sorts itself as games are graded.
The columns are Rank, Player, Record and PCT, followed by one column per week of the pool. Confidence pools add a Points column before Record, because there the total that decides the order is not the same as the number of correct picks.
First place is printed in gold and second and third in indigo. Your own row is highlighted and tagged You. Tied members share one rank number: it is printed once for the group and the rows under it carry a connector instead of repeating it. Before the pool's first game there are no ranks to show, so the column reads as dashes.
Above the table sit four figures about you rather than about the pool: Overall Rank, Overall Percentile, Behind Leader and Pool Avg. Behind Leader is quoted in your format's own unit, so it reads as wins in a Beat the Spread pool and as points in a Confidence pool.
Survivor pools have no leaderboard. They replace it with Make Pick and Survivor Board, and both the picks page and the leaderboard send you there — where you stand is a matter of who is still alive, not of a total.
Weekly winners
A week records up to three places, but only 1st place is ever paid the weekly award — every place below it is recorded with an award of 0.
The owner sets both numbers in the Winners & Awards card at /pools/:id/settings/winners. Winners per week decides how many places are recorded each week, from one to three. Weekly award sets what 1st place receives in SportBucks, where 0 means no award.
Raising Winners per week does not push the award further down the list. Second and third are recorded at 0, and there is no setting that pays them. The only way a week pays more than one member is a tie for first under the Share the win policy.
Results are finalised on an hourly pass, and again as soon as a week's last game goes final. A decided week is stored rather than worked out again each time the page is opened, which is why an announced winner does not quietly change later. Only a deliberate score correction re-opens a week.
- A paused pool stops recording weekly winners, because finalising runs only for a pool that is active and not paused. The weeks are recorded once it resumes.
- Playoff pools have no weekly winners at all. They are decided once, across the whole postseason.
SportBucks are a virtual tracking tool only. No real money is collected or distributed through this platform.
Season winners
A pool records final standings places as well as weekly ones, and a tied title is shared by default: the tied members are co-champions unless the owner switched that pool to a tiebreaker.
Final places recognized covers one to three places, and it sits beside When the title is tied in the same Winners & Awards settings as the weekly fields, under a heading of Season Winners — or Playoff Winners in a Playoff Pool. A title never rolls over and never pays nobody: a tie is either shared or sent to a tiebreaker.
Per-place prizes are separate from the weekly award. They pay a recorded place only when SportBucks is switched on and that scope's prize schedule is enabled too; otherwise every place pays 0. When members tie, the prize places their tie spans are pooled and split evenly, and the leftover is recorded rather than dropped.
If nobody finishes with a positive total, the pool records no champion rather than declaring everyone a tied winner. That reads as No champion, which is not the same thing as a title that has not been decided yet.
Survivor pools are decided by how long you survived and never pay a title prize, which is why the SportBucks Planner is hidden for them.
When first place is tied
A tied first place is settled by the pool's weekly tie policy, and a pool that has never set one treats the week as No winner: nobody takes it and no award is paid.
Only a tie for first place changes anything, because first place is the only paid weekly place. The owner chooses one of four policies under When first place is tied, in the pool's Winners & Awards settings.
The two defaults are opposites. A pool that has never set a weekly policy treats a tied week as No winner, while a tied season title defaults to being shared. If you expect tied weeks to be split, the owner has to choose Share the win — that is not where a new pool starts.
Each week that rolls adds its award to the next week's, so after two rolled weeks in a row the third week's first place is worth three weekly awards. A pot cannot roll past the pool's last week: a tie there shares the accumulated pot instead of stranding it.
A policy change applies to weeks decided after it is saved. Weeks already settled keep the result they were recorded with. If the policy is Tiebreaker, the ladder under Tiebreaker questions below is what decides the week.
Tiebreaker questions
When a pool uses the Tiebreaker policy, tied members are separated by their answers to one question: the total points scored in a designated game.
The question appears as a card on your picks page, reading Predict the total points. You answer before that game kicks off, and your answer is only ever used if you end up tied for a place that is being settled this way.
- 1 The closest guess wins — the smallest gap between your number and the game's actual total.
- 2 If two guesses are equally close, the earlier submission wins.
- 3 Anyone who answered beats anyone who did not.
- 4 If that still cannot separate them, the owner's fallback applies: Share the award, or No award.
Those four rungs are the whole ladder. Nothing else feeds into it — not how many picks you got right, and not your record against the other member.
The designated game is the last scheduled game of the period unless the owner chose one. Automatically chosen questions are re-pointed each hour as the schedule shifts, and the moment a question locks is always read from the game's live kickoff time, so a flexed game does not leave the window open or shut at the wrong time.
Once the week is decided, the Winners page replays the answer on the row it settled, showing the guess and how far off it was.
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