The most common football pool is the standard 100 square football pool. At almost every Super Bowl party you have ever been to you might have seen this 10 x 10 betting sheet and wondered what it is. There’s nothing like a friendly little game to liven up the party during the Super Bowl. This pool is built around a simple chart calls for no skill or previous knowledge of how to bet the spread or of the game of football in general. In this article I will explain how easy this to partake in and how much fun this form of gambling on football can add to the game.
How a 100 square football pool works is very simple. Whoever the party host or pool host may be creates at 10 squares by 10 squares chart; this is numbered on each axis from 0-9. Each axis is also labeled home/away or by each team playing, if chosen.
The pool host will then try to sell each square on the chart, usually ranging from $5-$100, depending on the type of clientele buying the squares. After all the squares have been sold, each box is then assigned at random so that everyone has a fair chance to get a coveted square. Another method some pool hosts use is to have all the entrants write their names down inside a single square of their liking on the blank 100 square pool sheet and then use 10 cards (Ace through Nine) to randomly draw the numbers at the top and side of the pool sheet.
How do you know which squares are the best? This is simple, so the way this works is that every square on the board will assign two numbers. For instance, if you had a square in the middle of the board, this would correspond to 5 for the home team and 5 for the away team. So what do those 5’s mean?
The numbers 0-9 correspond to either the last number in the home or away team score depending on where the square is located. So 20 points would be a 0 whereas 35 would be 5 points.
So how do you win? At the end of the first quarter, halftime, third quarter, and final score whatever the score is will be awarded to the person who owns that square. If the score is 17-10 at the half with the home team winning, the person with the squares of 7 and 0 would win that portion of the game. Having the squares 0 and 7 would not help because it would be assigned to the wrong teams. Usually the total money is divided by 5, and is paid out as follows. 1st quarter, Halftime, and 3rd quarter all get a 1/5 of the total bank and the Final Score doubles this to 2/5. So if you were involved on a $5 dollar pool and all 100 squares were filled that would be $500 to be paid out. With that number you would get paid $200 for final score and $100 for all other scores.
Which numbers are the best to have when entering the office pool? The top 5 most common scores for NFL games since 1970 are 20-17, 17-14, 27-24, 13-10, and 24-17. So as you can see if one of your numbers is 0, 3, 4, or 7, then you already have a leg-up on the competition.
