SportBucks
The app's play money: what it tracks, how you earn it, and how an owner sets it up.
What SportBucks are
SportBucks are a whole-number score the app awards for winning a week or finishing a season, tracked separately inside each pool as a way to keep count of who has won what.
They exist so a pool can have stakes without money. A week's winner is awarded an amount the owner chose, the amount is recorded against that week, and your total is the sum of everything you have been awarded.
There is no wallet and no balance to spend down. Nothing subtracts SportBucks from you, and the number only moves when a result is decided or, rarely, corrected.
SportBucks are counted per pool. The total on your activity feed adds up every pool you are in, but that is a display of your record rather than a shared pot — nothing moves between pools.
SportBucks are not real money
SportBucks cannot be bought, cashed out, exchanged, or moved between players or pools, and Sportpoolz never collects or distributes money of any kind.
SportBucks are a virtual tracking tool only. No real money is collected or distributed through this platform.
- There is nothing to buy. SportBucks cannot be purchased, topped up, or earned by paying.
- There is nothing to redeem. They cannot be converted into money, credit, goods, or anything else.
- They cannot be sent, gifted, or traded to another player.
- They do not carry between pools, and they do not expire.
Anything a group chooses to arrange among themselves happens entirely outside Sportpoolz. The app records a number against a result and has no knowledge of, or part in, anything beyond that.
How you earn them
A weekly award goes to first place only, and season or playoff prizes go to the finishing places the owner chose — every other position earns nothing.
Only first place is paid a weekly award. Raising "Winners per week" records second and third place in the standings, but it does not give them a share of the week's award.
Results are worked out shortly after a week's last game finishes, and a check runs every hour to catch anything that settled late. A week is only decided once, so an award you have already been given does not change when the owner edits the amount later.
Survivor pools do not award SportBucks at all, and a playoff pool has no weekly awards because it has no weekly scoring.
Where you see them
Your per-pool total sits on that pool's Winners page, and a running total across every pool you are in sits on your activity feed.
Awards are shown with the letters SB after the number. A week that paid nothing simply shows no award, rather than a zero.
SportBucks do not appear on the leaderboard. The leaderboard ranks picks; awards are shown on the winner card above it and on the Winners page.
Your record and standing
Your activity feed carries a record card showing every SportBuck you have been awarded across all your pools, the standing you have reached, and what you have earned along the way.
The card sits at the top of your activity feed. It counts awards from every pool you have played in, including ones you have since left — a record of what you have won does not shrink because you moved on.
Standings are named rungs rather than a score out of ten, and everyone starts on one. They are spaced widely on purpose: each owner picks their own award amounts, so two pools can differ by an order of magnitude and a finer ladder would say more about who you play with than about you.
- On the Roster — where everyone starts, before a first award.
- On the Board — you have been awarded SportBucks for the first time.
- In the Circle, On the Wall, In the Record Book, In the Rafters — reached in turn as your total grows.
Alongside the standing, the card marks things you have done: a first award, weeks won, a season finish, awards in more than one pool. They are a record of what happened, nothing more.
Standings and marks are recognition only. They unlock nothing, change nothing about how your picks are scored, and give you no advantage in any pool.
When a week's award rolls over
If the owner chose to roll ties over, a week nobody wins adds its award to the next week, so two rolled weeks make the following week worth three times the usual amount.
Rolling only happens when the owner set the weekly tie rule to roll over. It applies both when first place is tied and when nobody scored at all: the week records no winner, and its award carries forward.
The run has to be unbroken. A week that pays out ends the carry, and the week after it starts again at the normal amount.
On the pool's final week a tie is shared instead of rolled, so an accumulated pot is split between whoever is tied rather than being left unclaimed. Shares are whole numbers, and anything left over is dropped.
If the owner changes the weekly tie rule away from rolling over, the amount built up so far stops being carried and later weeks pay only the normal award.
Setting SportBucks up
Owners set the weekly amount and any season or playoff prizes in the pool's settings, and the amounts apply to weeks decided after the change is saved.
- 1 Open your pool's settings and go to SportBucks Planner.
- 2 Turn SportBucks on, then set a prize per winner for weekly winners.
- 3 If you want end-of-season prizes, turn season prizes on and set an amount for each finishing place you recognise.
- 4 Save the plan. New amounts apply to weeks decided from then on.
The weekly amount also appears under Winners & Awards, alongside the tie rules and how many places you recognise. It is the same setting in both places — changing it in one changes it in the other.
The planner also lets you enter a figure per participant and shows how a plan would divide up. That is a planning aid for your own benefit: it is never shown to players, nothing is collected, and it does not change what any award pays.
Season and playoff prizes need SportBucks switched on as well as that scope's own prizes switch. The weekly award does not — if you set a weekly amount, weeks pay it whether or not the SportBucks switch is on.
Amounts are whole numbers and can be zero, which is the default and means the pool simply records winners without awarding anything. How many prize places you can set follows how many final places the pool recognises, up to three.
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