Format guide
Everyone picks the winner of every game on the slate. One point per correct pick, most points takes the week. No spreads, no handicaps, no arithmetic — which is exactly why it is the format almost every office pool starts with.
The free-tier format, on NFL, College Football and MLB. Joining a pool is free for every player, always — and nothing here is played for real money.
The format
A pick’em pool hands every player the same slate of games and asks one question per game: who wins? You take a side on each one, each pick locks when its game kicks off, and the moment a game goes final Pooldit grades it. One point per correct pick. The most points at the end of the week takes the week.
There is no spread to cover and no handicap to apply. If your team wins by one you were right; if they win by forty you were right by exactly the same amount. That flatness is the format’s entire personality — a player who has never heard of line movement can beat a player who watches it all week, and anyone can read the standings without being taught anything first.
It is also the base that the other formats are built on. A confidence pool keeps the same slate and lets you put more weight on the games you trust; a survivor pool throws the slate away and gives you a single pick a week to spend. If you have never run a pool before, run this one.
Scoring
Because every game carries the same value, a pick’em week is decided by volume rather than by nerve. That leaves exactly one thing worth deciding in advance — what happens when two players finish level — and Pooldit makes the commissioner choose it at setup instead of arguing about it on a Monday night.
Closest guess wins
Tied players guess the combined final score of the last-scheduled game of the week, and the closest guess takes it. The classic Monday-night tiebreaker, and the default.
Even split
Tied players split the prize for that placement evenly. Nobody guesses a number, and nobody loses a week on a late touchdown in a game they did not even pick.
Commissioner toggle
Pick’em rides straight up by default. A commissioner who wants real sportsbook spreads on it can flip the pool to against-the-spread — or run a confidence pool, which does that and puts weights on top.
Picks close exactly at kickoff, never before it. The commissioner chooses which kickoff: per-game locking closes each pick at its own game’s start, and one-lock closes the whole sheet when the week’s first game starts. A locked pick is locked — nobody edits it afterwards, the commissioner included.
Worked example
The slate is thirteen NFL games. Ana finishes 9-4. Ben finishes 9-4. Carla finishes 7-6.
Carla is third on 7 points and Ana and Ben are level on 9, so the tiebreaker decides it. Ana guessed 47 combined points in the last game of the week and Ben guessed 51. It finishes 27-17 — 44 points. Ana is three away, Ben is seven away, and Ana takes the week by a field goal in a game she may not even have picked correctly.
Under a split pot, the same two would have taken half each and neither guess would have mattered at all. That is the whole difference between the two settings, and it is worth knowing which one your group prefers before the season rather than after it.
Repeat that eighteen times and you have a season. Nothing in it asked anybody to know what a spread is, and nothing in it asked the commissioner to open a spreadsheet — the grade lands on its own the moment the last game goes final.
The hybrid slate
This is the part a single-league pool site cannot do. A Pooldit pool is not locked to one league — you choose the leagues, and Saturday’s College Football card can sit on the same sheet as Sunday’s NFL card, in the same standings, scored the same way.
For a lot of groups that is the pool they always wanted. The college fans and the pro fans stop running two pools, two spreadsheets and two arguments. Take every game from both slates, or curate a short list — twelve games your group actually cares about instead of thirty-one it does not.
Straight pick’em across NFL and College Football is also the free commissioner tier, which makes it the lowest-friction pool on this site to get a group into: you send one link and nobody is ever asked for a card. Pooldit is in open beta, so every feature and every league is open to everybody through October regardless — there is nothing to buy here today.
More on football pools · How live odds work here
Hybrids are not a football-only trick — MLB, the Canadian Football League, Major League Soccer and the English Premier League can be mixed in as well. The in-app sport picker is always the honest, current list: what is playable now, what is dormant until its season opens, and what is still on the roadmap.
Commissioner setup
Step 1
One league or several. The picker shows what is live right now and what opens with its season, so you cannot accidentally build a pool with no games in it.
Step 2
Every game in the week, or a hand-picked shortlist. Pooldit opens each week on schedule, locks it, and tells everybody it did.
Step 3
Weekly versus season prize split, the tiebreaker above, and how dits are distributed. A one-click preset gets a pool live in under a minute.
Step 4
Your players open the invite, preview the pool and join. Joining is always free — no per-player fee, and no cut of anything your group plays for.
Who it is for
Pick’em is the right call for a big, mixed, not-especially-serious group — an office, a family, a group chat where half the people watch every snap and half turn up for the playoffs. It has the shallowest learning curve of anything here, it never eliminates anybody, and somebody who joins in week six can still have a good season.
It is the wrong call when your group wants its picks to carry different weight. If the argument in your chat is about which game is the lock of the week, you want a confidence pool. If you want the field to thin out until one person is left holding everything, you want a survivor pool.
How a confidence pool works · How a survivor pool works · Which pool type suits a first-time group
Every player picks a winner for every game on the week’s slate. Each pick locks when its own game kicks off, and each correct pick is worth one point — a blowout and a one-point win score exactly the same. The player with the most points at the end of the week wins the week, and the commissioner decides in advance how much of the pot goes to weekly winners versus the end of the season.
No — a pick’em pool is straight up by default, so you are picking outright winners with no handicap. A commissioner who wants real sportsbook spreads can switch the pool to against-the-spread, and a commissioner who wants spreads and weighted picks together should run a confidence pool instead.
Whichever tiebreaker the commissioner chose at setup. The default asks tied players to guess the combined final score of the last-scheduled game of the week, and the closest guess takes it. The alternative is a split pot, where tied players simply share that placement’s prize evenly and nobody guesses anything.
Yes, and it is one of the things Pooldit is built for. A pool picks its leagues rather than being locked to one, so Saturday’s College Football games and Sunday’s NFL games can sit on the same sheet and in the same standings. You can take both full slates or curate a shortlist of the games your group actually cares about, and MLB, the Canadian Football League, Major League Soccer and the English Premier League can be mixed in the same way.
Playing in any pool you are invited to is free for everyone, permanently. Hosting a straight pick’em pool on NFL, College Football or MLB is the free commissioner tier. Everything on the site is open and free through October while Pooldit is in open beta — billing has not opened, so every button here creates a free account today — and from November 1 commissioners will pay $5 a month for every league and every format.
Get started
Hosting an NFL, College Football or MLB straight pick’em pool is free, and playing in any pool you are invited to is free for everybody, always. Everything on Pooldit is open and free through October; from November 1, commissioners will pay $5 a month for the full catalogue of leagues and formats. Pools play for dits, an in-app currency that just keeps score of whatever your group already agreed on in the real world — bragging rights, jelly beans, soda refills, whatever. Pooldit never takes, holds or moves real money.
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