How To Make Football Squares For Super Bowl

Football Squares (commonly referred to as Super Bowl Squares) is an exciting game that anyone can play, regardless of their knowledge of football. To get started, create your squares pool online or download our free printable football squares sheet. Once your blank football squares board is ready to go, players can begin selecting squares prior. How to Set Up Your Super Bowl Squares Grid Create a grid ten boxes high and ten boxes wide. This will give you 100 boxes, which means you can potentially have 100 people participating in this pool, although usually far fewer people are used. Over the top of your grid, write the name of one of the teams competing in the Super Bowl.

• How To Make Squares For Super Bowl
• Nfl Printable Super Bowl Squares
• How To Play Super Bowl Football Squares
• Super Bowl 2021 Football Squares

I’ve seen football squares played in multiple ways, especially during the Super Bowl. I used to play with my buddies from work on a regular basis. I also hung out in a neighborhood bar that always hosted Super Bowl squares. These are the rules for the football squares games I’ve always played in:

Football Squares Rules and Options

We always used a piece of poster-board to create the squares. The game was set up with a 10X10 grid, which results in 100 individual squares. Across the top, you took one team. You also had a team assigned to the team on the left.

You decide on how much it’s going to cost to play. $20 is a good number, although I’ve played in betting pools that used $1, $5, or $10 to buy a square. If you have some high rolling friends, you could even sell squares for $100 each.

If you’re running the pool, you should always collect the money for the squares before letting people put their names in the squares. And that’s the basic idea—the players pay their fee, and when they do, they get to write their name in a square.

The players should be allowed to buy multiple squares if they want to, also.

When we played at the local bar, we always used a variety of colored pens for people’s names.

It’s usually a good idea to get the football squares announced and sell the squares as early as possible. If you don’t sell all the squares, you’re pretty much forced to refund everyone’s money, which makes for a lame betting pool indeed.

AFTER you’ve sold all the squares, you chose the numbers for each row and column, 0 through 9. This is best done with a witness or 2 present, and we always used a deck of cards for this. (We just took an ace through 10 of a specific suit and drew the cards at random, filling the areas in the column and the rows in as we went.

An Example of a Completed Football Square

Here’s what a completed football square would look like:

You use the final digit of the score for each team to determine the winner. In some betting pools, it’s a winner-take-all situation.

For example, using the example above, let’s assume everyone paid $10 to play. This means that there’s $1000 in the pot.

The final score for the game is 10-7, so the number to look for is 0 and 7. Cliff has that square, so he wins the $1000.

A more common way to run such a pool, though, is to have winners each quarter. You can set it up so that each quarter wins 25% of the pot. This means that if you had the appropriate square at the end of the first quarter, you’d win $250.

It’s also common to pay out 20% of the pot for the scores at the end of each of the first 3 quarters, then pay out 40% of the pot for the final score. This means $200 for quarters 1 through 3, and $400 for the final square.

Football Squares – Variations

You can set up different variations of the squares, too. You could set it up so that you have a different set of numbers for each quarter, for example. You’d need to modify the square accordingly or have 4 separate squares.

You could set it up so that there are 2 sets of numbers, one for the first half and another for the 2nd half.

Or, if you don’t have a lot of players, you could set up a 5X5 grid instead of a 10X10 grid. Each square would represent 2 possible numbers for each team instead.

You can, if you like, use some kind of online app for the actual management of the football squares. Some people enjoy this option, although I enjoy analog stuff like poster-boards and markers.

If you’re the greedy type, say, if you own a bar or something—you might charge all the participants $11 to buy squares, then base the payouts on a $10 buy-in. You sell 100 squares for $11 each, and you keep $100 for hosting the game. The other $1000 goes into the prize pool.

Depending on the nature of your business and its patrons, this might or might not make sense. If you own a bar, you might be better off just not trying to profit from the Super Bowl squares anyway. After all, people will be coming to the bar to watch the games, and they’ll spend money on drinks while they’re doing that.

Which Are the Best Numbers to Get in a Football Square?

• The best numbers to have at the end of the first quarter are 0, 0. Statistically, it’s common for that to be the score at the end of the first quarter. The 2nd-best numbers to have at the end of the first quarter are 7, 7.
• At halftime, the best numbers to have change. 7, 3 are the best numbers to have at halftime, followed by 7, 7 and 4, 0.
• At the end of the 3rd quarter, the best numbers to have are 4, 0; 7, 0; and 3, 7.
• For the final score, the best number to have are, in order, 3,0; 5, 4; 1, 7; and 4, 4.
• The worst numbers to have at any point in the game are 2, 9, and 5.
• The 0 and the 7 are far and away the best digits to have.

These numbers are based on statistics from Super Bowl scores from the years from 2005 to 2014.

Other Kinds of Football Betting Pools

This is just the most common kind of football betting pool. The other most common football pool that I know of (and my favorite) is the pick’em pool, or the last man standing pool.

Here’s how the pick’em pool works:

Everyone contributes to the pot. $20 is a good number, but you could do $10 or $100 if you have a bunch of high rolling friends.

Every week, you pick the winner from one game. For purposes of determining the winner, you ignore the point spread. All you must do is choose the winner.

If you’re right, you survive to go on to next week’s game. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost.

Eventually, and sooner than most people think, there’s only a single player left. That player wins the pot.

If, at the end of the season, you have 2 or more survivors, they can split the prize money. In fact, they can decide to split the prize money at any point, too. I was in a survivor pool once that got down to 2 survivors, and they each continue to pick winners correctly through the end of the season.

I’ve also hung out at bars that hosted these kinds of pools who would set up multiple pools. After the first week, a surprising number of people get knocked out of the original pool, and they’re usually eager to get into a new survivor pool.

You can only do this if you have a reasonable number of weeks left in the season, though. At some point in the season, you have to stop launching survivor pools.

Fantasy football games can also be considered a kind of football betting pool. When I started playing fantasy football, it was just fantasy football, but nowadays you must distinguish between daily fantasy football events and season-long events.

Here’s how fantasy football works:

Everyone gets to draft a team of players. Their team scores points based on each individual player’s performance on their team. In most season-long leagues, you play according to a schedule each week—your team faces another team.

In other season-long leagues, every week you’re ranked based on your score compared to everyone else’s. I’ve also seen fantasy football leagues where you play every other team in the league every week.

In a daily fantasy sports contest, you do the same thing, but the season ends at the end of the week when the last football game has been played. These fantasy games can be played heads-up or tournament-style. When you’re playing heads-up, you only need to beat one opponent. But if you’re playing in a tournament, you face a field of opponents and must score enough to place in the top XX% to win money.

This necessitates a different approach to drafting a team, by the way. If you’re playing heads-up, you’re looking for reliable numbers you can count on that will probably defeat an average competitor.

But if you’re playing in a tournament, you’re looking to draft players who have the potential to have a huge week. You’ll need multiple players to have huge weeks to win a tournament, because you’re facing so many opponents.

The daily fantasy sports industry owes much to the world of online poker for its approach to heads-up and tournament-style fantasy sports contests. The buy-ins and payouts are similar to the buy-ins and payouts you’d find in single and multi-table tournaments at an internet poker site.

Conclusion

This post about how to play football squares and how to play Super Bowl squares is one of my shorter blog posts. That’s because it’s just not that hard to host and play this kind of game.

It’s as simple as creating a 10X10 grid and selling the squares, then randomly assigning the digits to the rows and columns. Deciding how the payouts work in advance is a good idea, too.

Finding a pool of players is usually pretty easy if you’re at all social. If you’re a regular at a bar or own a bar, that’s probably the best way to find players.

Have you ever played football squares? What’s the most you ever won?

If you’re a football fan, if your friends follow the NFL, or if you work in an office, chances are you’ve heard of a football pool.

A football pool using “squares,” typically a 10 x 10 grid, is an easy way to get a group of people to bet on a football game using a random assignment of numbers to names to find out who wins the pot for every quarter.

Unlike other types of sports bets, you don’t need to be an economist or calculate odds or know anything about the teams (or even the sport) to win.

This is a luck-based system, not a skill-based approach, and it’s designed to make a football game more fun and interesting, with some real money on the line.

Football squares pools, are especially popular for the Super Bowl. If you’ve never played before, or want to learn more, here’s our guide on how to play Super Bowl squares.

What Are Football Squares?

Football squares, also known as a football pool or football boxes, is a way of placing bets for a group of people using a basic X-Y axis (remember algebra?) Players enter their names (usually initials) into as many squares as they wish to buy into.

How To Make Squares For Super Bowl

Each square represents a score. At the end of each quarter, the person on the square that corresponds to the score at that time is given his or her share of the prize money.

When playing Super Bowl squares, the winner of each quarter of the big game is typically given a quarter of the money paid into the pool.

The grid used to set up a squares game looks complicated but is actually quite simple to grasp once you get the hang of it. Here’s an example of one.

Essentially, the pool pays out each quarter based on the last digit of the score of each team. For instance, if the score is 17-13, the winner would be the person on the 7-3 square.

How to Set Up Your Super Bowl Squares Grid

Create a grid ten boxes high and ten boxes wide. This will give you 100 boxes, which means you can potentially have 100 people participating in this pool, although usually far fewer people are used.

Over the top of your grid, write the name of one of the teams competing in the Super Bowl.

Vertically, along the left-hand side of the grid, write the name of the other team.

Although the Super Bowl boxes layout is called a ten by ten, you do need room to write the numbers 0-9 along the top columns, one number for each column, and along the vertical left-hand side of the chart as well.

Here’s how the grids looks once the numbers are filled in.

You can choose not to enter the numbers before people pick their squares, and add them in a random order later instead. This is if you don’t want people to know what scores they are assigning themselves to.

For the standard version of Super Bowl squares rules, yes. The football pool uses only the last digit of a score (for instance, if the score is Team A – 12, Team B – 15, then the grid would be followed to find out who is at the intersection of Team A – 2 and Team B – 5.

Since the ending numbers of any given score can range from between zero and nine, which includes 10 number options total, there must be 10 squares on each side of the chart.

How Many People Are Needed to Play Super Bowl Squares?

You can create a football pool using this squares method using as few as two people and as many as 100. The fewer people are involved, the more squares they can buy.

If there are 100 people, each person would be able to choose one square. Fifty participants would be able to choose two squares each, and 25 people could have four squares apiece.

However, some people may only wish to buy into one square, while others wish to buy into multiples.

You can limit the number of squares available to each participant until all players have had a chance to buy squares. You can then sell the extra squares to players who wish to play more squares to increase their chances of winning.

If you are playing with an actual sheet of paper, hand the grid around before the numbers are assigned across the top and down the left side.

If you are playing electronically, there are automatic pool fill apps that can scatter the names/initials equally across the board.

What If Squares in the Super Bowl Squares Grid Are Empty?

You may have empty squares on your board. Either only a few people are playing, or there simply wasn’t anyone who wanted that particular square. This is not uncommon.

If the score lands on a space where no one has their name, you can add that money to the prize for the next quarter. Thus, the winner of the next quarter will receive a double payout.

This is entirely up to you and the other participants. A standard buy-in is $5 per square, but it can go as low as $1 per square and as high as you want.

The more people who participate, the higher the energy, and the more fun the squares game is. So you may want to consider a buy-in that will allow as many people as possible to participate.

Yes, players will write their initials in on the squares they choose, but since the numbers along the top and left side of the grid can be entered later, the placement of the names in the squares doesn’t have to be relevant. It just depends on how you want to play.

In the example Super Bowl squares template above, the numbers were in order from 0-9. You can choose to mix the numbers up, though.

Nfl Printable Super Bowl Squares

For instance, across the top ten squares, in which you will write the digits 0-9, you may choose to array them thus: 2, 4, 1, 0, 9, 5, 8, 6, 7, 3. Do the same vertically.

The reason for doing this is to make the game fairer, and to remove any benefit from those who choose their Super Bowl squares before others. Certain scores are more likely to win than others, so it can be an advantage to avoid those squares.

How To Play Super Bowl Football Squares

You can use squares grids to create a pool for any football game, from pee-wee to pro. The rules for Super Bowl squares games remain essentially the same regardless.

You and your friends may be avid Monday Night Football fans and can have a pool every week using the same grid over and over, simply changing the names of the teams on the axis or creating a new grid and placing the names in different squares for each game.

A squares games can be used to enliven a sports-themed bachelor/bachelorette party, a birthday party, or even just having friends over on Sunday for the game. This squares game, which gives all players the same chance to win, caters to football fans and non-fans alike, and in fact pulls non-football fans into the excitement by giving them some stakes in the game.

Squares pools can be used for fundraising (check local laws). You can collect the buy-in for each square, as usual, but instead of paying out the entire intake 1/4 at a time for each quarter, you could pay 1/8 of the “pot” to the winner of each quarter, which leaves you with 1/2 of the funds to give to the charitable cause.

Getting a whole office, club, or team on board with a squares pool is a solid way to team-build and start conversations. It gets people talking about the game, creates relationships, and eases the atmosphere.

You can also play squares for other sports and tournaments. March Madness, for example, or ice hockey.

With some rearrangement of the prize disbursement and how scores are calculated, they can be used for PGA Tour events and even the Olympics.

Learning how to play Super Bowl squares is not that difficult. It doesn’t take much to start a football squares pool.

You just need a piece of paper, or a pre-printed Super Bowl squares template, and some willing participants. It’s a fun way to bet on the Super Bowl among friends.

Super Bowl 2021 Football Squares

Once you’ve explained the rules for playing Super Bowl squares, and got the boxes filled out, your only real work is to watch the game!