Pool format
An allowance sports pool gives every player the same budget of nits — the pool’s own play-money currency — each week and lets them spend it however they like — moneylines, spreads and totals, priced the way a real sportsbook would price them. Read the board well and your balance grows. Read it badly and you are out of ammunition until the next budget lands.
Pooldit is not a gambling site. There is nothing to deposit, nothing staked and nothing to cash out — nits are play money, and the odds are here to make the picks interesting and to grade them honestly.
How it works
A classic pick’em pool asks one question per game: who wins? An allowance pool with betting odds asks two more — how much do you like it, and at what price? Every player starts the week with an identical budget of nits, and the whole pool sees the same slate at the same numbers.
From there it is your call. Put the entire budget on the one game you are certain about — there is no maximum wager beyond what you have — or spread it across eight. Take a heavy favorite and accept the thin return, or take the underdog and get paid properly when it lands. Nothing forces you to spend it all, and nothing stops you.
That is the part a spreadsheet cannot do. Grading a weighted, priced, multi-market week by hand means remembering what the line was when each person made each pick. Pooldit stamps the price onto your ticket the moment you submit it, so a line that moves afterwards never changes what you were paid.
pick the winner
Straight up, priced. A favorite at -200 returns less profit than you risked; an underdog at +180 returns more. No spread to worry about.
pick the winner after the handicap
The favorite gives points, the underdog gets them. Usually priced close to even on both sides — the market to use when you like a team but not the price on their moneyline.
over or under
Bet the combined score instead of a side. For the week you have no opinion on who wins and a strong one on how the game gets played.
How a pick’em pool works · How allowance compares with the other four pool types
Prices come from the same consensus sportsbook feed the rest of the site runs on, and they move as the real market moves. Your ticket keeps the number that was showing when you submitted it. A push refunds your stake in full, as does a postponed or cancelled game.
A week, in full
Say the pool hands out 100 nits a week and you spread them across four games. American odds tell you the profit on a winner: a plus number is the profit on a 100-nit stake, a minus number the stake it takes to profit 100.
You go two-for-four — a losing record — and finish at 123.05 nits. The player who went three-for-four, backing four 25-nit favorites at -250 apiece, finishes at 105: three winners returned 10 nits each and the fourth cost the full 25. Being right more often lost to being right at better prices, which is the whole argument for the format in one line.
won → +54.00
The week’s big swing: 30 nits at +180 returns 54 nits of profit — more than the rest of the card put together.
lost → -40.00
The biggest position on the card, and it missed. At -110 it would have made 36.36. Size is a decision too.
won → +19.05
A total, priced a shade under even. Small, cheap, and it does not care which team wins.
lost → -10.00
At -250 this only ever stood to make 4 nits and it cost 10 — exactly why a heavy favorite is a worse bet than it feels like.
Net for the week: +23.05 nits. Every number above is play money — nits are not dollars, not credits, and not redeemable for anything.
Solo play
An allowance pool does not need a group. Create one with a single member — you — and you have a personal sportsbook simulator: the full board at real prices, a fixed budget every week, and a record of how each nit would have done at the book. It is the honest answer to "am I actually any good at this?", asked with no deposit screen in sight.
You need not play it against nobody, either. Drop a coin-flip benchmark agent into the pool and you have a pure-chance opponent — beating it over a season is the difference between skill and a hot streak. (Named strategies and the freeform custom-agent builder are not offered in this format: an allowance agent spends its whole balance across sampled games, so its record would measure the staking rule rather than the strategy on the label. Both are available in every other format we run.)
Your picks accrue to your record either way, led by unit ROI — how you would have done in Vegas, with every nit priced at real sportsbook odds. (Unit ROI keeps its name in an allowance pool: it is a ratio, so it reads the same whichever way the stake is counted.)
Autopick agents and the custom builder · How live odds work here
Allowance is a Players Club format, and personal stat accrual outside the free pool types is a Players Club feature. Pooldit is in open beta with billing not yet open, so every button on this site creates a free account today; Players Club will be $5 a month, cancellable anytime, when billing does open.
For commissioners
You pick the budget, the period and the leagues; Pooldit does the rest. It opens each period, pulls current spreads and odds, locks every ticket at kickoff, grades results as games go final, and updates the standings without anyone touching a spreadsheet — including you. A week is the usual period; a day or any other length works the same way.
Two settings shape the whole feel of the pool. Carry over unspent nits is off by default, so everyone is level again each week; switch it on and a good week compounds into a bigger bankroll, turning the pool into a season-long bankroll race. You can also hand out the budget as one season-long lump instead of a recurring allowance.
The NFL and College Football together combination is the one worth knowing about: a curated handful of Saturday college games plus the full Sunday NFL slate gives your players a board that runs Thursday to Monday night, a far better week than either league alone. Any of our leagues can be remixed the same way — your pool, your rules, your favorite sports. The ledger underneath is kept in dits, the in-app currency that tracks whatever your group already agreed on in the real world, and we never take, hold or move a cent of it.
The disclosure
Pooldit is not a gambling site. It never takes, holds or moves real money. There is nothing to deposit, nothing being staked here, and nothing to cash out. Nits are a scorekeeping device, and a pool balance buys precisely nothing.
Real prices are shown for two reasons only: they make a pick meaningfully harder than a coin flip, and they let us grade your judgement against a real benchmark instead of an invented one. Whatever your group plays for — bragging rights, jelly beans, soda refills, whatever! — stays entirely between the people in it. We never take a cut, because we never touch it.
It is a pool format where every player receives the same budget of nits — the pool’s own play-money currency — each period — usually a week — and spends it across the games on the pool’s slate at real sportsbook prices. Moneylines, spreads and totals are all available, and winning bets pay the way the book would pay them, so the standings reward reading the board well rather than simply picking the most winners. Some groups call it a bankroll pool. Everything in it is play money.
Neither. Pooldit is not a gambling site: it never takes, holds or moves real money, there is nothing to deposit, nothing is staked here, and there is nothing to cash out. Nits are play money and a pool balance is not redeemable for anything. Real odds are displayed because they make the picks interesting and let us grade your performance against an honest benchmark, not because anything is being wagered on this site.
Yes. A one-person allowance pool is a personal sportsbook simulator — the full board at real prices, a fixed budget every period, and a record of how each nit would have done at the book. A coin-flip benchmark agent can be added to the pool so you always have a pure-chance opponent to measure yourself against. Your picks still accrue to your stats, led by unit ROI, which is how you would have done in Vegas with every nit priced at real sportsbook odds.
There is no maximum beyond the nits you actually have, so putting the entire budget on a single game is a legal move — an expensive one, but legal. The commissioner sets a minimum stake per pick, and you can place as many separate wagers as you like, including on more than one market in the same game. Nothing requires you to spend the whole budget.
Nits are the pool’s own play-money currency. Everybody gets the same budget of them each period, and a nit is the same size for every player in the pool, which is what keeps balances and standings accurate and fair. Allowance pools used to call that same quantity a unit, and one nit is exactly what one unit was — a rename, not a reset. What is new is that a unit is now yours to define: a Unit size setting on your profile asks what your typical dollar amount per wager at a sportsbook is, and the pick tray then offers +1u and −1u buttons that add or subtract that many nits at a tap, beside +1n and −1n buttons that move a single nit. Leave it at the default of 1 and nothing changes. Your unit size feeds two things only — your own personal stats and your row on the global leaderboard, so your allowance play reads in the same terms as your other pools. Nothing inside the pool is ever converted: balances, statements, standings and the weekly review are always in nits.
By default, unspent nits expire when the period locks and everybody starts the next one level on the same budget. The commissioner can switch on carry-over instead, and then unspent nits and net winnings both roll forward, so a good week compounds into a bigger bankroll and the pool becomes a season-long bankroll race. There is also a season mode that hands out one lump budget at the start instead of a recurring allowance.
Any league Pooldit has working schedules, odds and automatic scoring for, and several can be mixed into one pool — NFL and College Football together is the popular combination, and MLB, the Canadian Football League, Major League Soccer and the English Premier League are all built. The in-app sport picker is the honest, current list: it shows what is playable now, what is dormant until its season opens, and what is still on the roadmap.
Playing in any pool you are invited to is always free, and there is never a per-player charge or a cut of what your group plays for. Allowance is a Players Club format. Pooldit is in an open beta and billing has not opened, so every button on this site creates a free account today; Players Club will be $5 a month, cancellable anytime, when billing does open.
Ready when you are
Create an account in under a minute, set the budget, and send one link to everybody. Or make it a pool of one and find out how your season would have gone at the book.
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