Football Squares Pool

Not interested in the teams playing in a football game? Bet on the score instead. Now you will care about the game, or at least the score. I couldn’t find a good free form to printout, so I made one (printable pdf version). If any of this is helpful, feel free to click a sponsored link on the right or below.

Here is how the popular pool betting game Squares works:

1. Get people to pick a square. There are two options: you can cut up the grid into 100 squares, label them, and pick them randomly out of a cup. Or you can leave the grid intact and let people pick the any square they want. If you want this to be fair you need to randomize the row and columns after people pick their squares because 0,3, and 7 are statistically superior to 2.
2. You want to sell all 100 squares to guarantee someone always winning. If you can’t find 100 people, then let people buy more than 1 square. You also have the option of carrying over the payout to the next quarter, but it sucks when no one wins. So make sure the grid is full.
3. The x,y pair means (home, away) the last digit of the scores (e.g. 7 is the last digit of 7, 17, 27, and so on). For instance, if you have square (0,0) and the score at the end of any quarter is 10-0, 0-0, 0-10, etc. then you win. Remember: order matters, 3-7 is not the same as 7-3
4. A payout schedule has to be determined ahead of time. Common payout schedule is supplied below.