One of my favorite ways to bet on football is through a betting pool or an office pool. One of the main reasons I like this means of betting on the game is because there’s no vig or juice. That’s the extra amount the bookmaker charges you to place your bet.
When you make a bet on football against the point spread in football, you usually must risk $110 to win $100. Sometimes, depending on the book, you might have to risk $120 to win $100. Since the point spread is supposed to even the odds to 50/50 for winning the bet, that extra amount you’re risking guarantees a profit to the book.
Of course, with a football betting pool, the administrator COULD take something off the top to pay for administering the pool, but most people don’t do that. I was in charge of the football betting pools in my office for a long time, and I never saw the need to profit from it. I just wanted to get some money in action every week.
Skill might or might not matter depending on what kind of betting pool you decide to have. One of the most traditional kinds of betting pools is a grid-shaped pool where the winners are determined by the final score of the game. This is more akin to a lottery than anything else.
Another kind of betting pool is called a survivor pool, or a last man standing pool. I have a buddy who writes a column about fantasy football, and he calls it “Last Man Standing.” It’s common for fantasy football leagues to run a last man standing pool concurrently with their actual fantasy football season. In fact, fantasy football is a 3rd kind of betting pool for football that you can start and/or participate in.
This post explains how to host a football betting pool of the most common variety. These aren’t the only ways to do it, though. You can find plenty of ways to form office pools for a variety of sports. I’ve seen entire books on the subject.
You can’t have a football betting pool unless you have people willing to participate. If you’re doing a grid-type pool, you need to have enough participants to sell 100 squares. If you’re hosting a survivor pool, though, you only need enough participants to keep it interesting. If you’re hosting a fantasy football league, you need enough players to have at least 2 or 3 divisions of 4 teams each, so 8 to 12 players. Fantasy football gets lame unless you hit that sweet spot of 12 players.
If you’re running a true office pool, you’ll ask your co-workers to participate. This is easy in the modern age. Just send an email to everyone you’re interested in having on-board with the details. Be careful, though. In some offices, they frown on this kind of thing. In other offices, they practically encourage it.
I was lucky. I was the manager of my department, so I had less risk than some people would have. Still, I had a director and a vice president to report to. Luckily, the VP over me was also a gambler, and he wanted to participate. We had lots of long conversations about blackjack, but he still didn’t like me. I quit before he could fire me, but that’s another story.
If you can’t get people from your office to participate, think about asking the people who belong to the same clubs that you do. Maybe you’re active in Kiwanis, or you’re a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Maybe you’re just a regular at your local bar, or maybe you play on the billiards league or the shuffleboard league.
I think you can even find people to participate in your betting pools online, especially if you want to play fantasy football. It’s hard to vouch for how much fun these participants will be, since they’ll often be strangers you’ve found over the internet. But unless you’re painfully shy and introverted, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding participants for your betting pool.
The most classic form of football office pool is the traditional grid. Here’s how it works: You start with a blank grid with 10 squares by 10 squares. This gives you a total of 100 squares to sell. One team gets assigned to the columns, and the other team gets assigned to the rows.
Then you decide how much to sell each square for. When people buy a square, they put their names in the squares they’ve bought. It’s common to sell squares for $1 each, but you could also easily sell them for $5 or $10 each. The more you charge per square, the bigger the prize pool becomes. The prize pool will always be 100X the price of each square. At $10 per square, the prize pool will be $1000, for example.
Once the squares have been bought, you randomly assign the numbers 1 through 10 to each row and each column. (The 10 is written down as a 0.) The easiest way to do this is with a deck of cards, by the way—just get the ace through 10 of a certain suit, mix them up, and draw the cards, writing the numbers down as you get them, in order. You’d have to do this twice, preferably with a witness.
The prizes get awarded based on the final digit of the score at the end of the contest. In some contests, it’s winner take all—the final score determines who wins the pot. In others, half the prize money goes to the winner at halftime, and the other half of the prize money goes to the winner at the final score. Some people do it quarterly.
Sometimes the score doesn’t change from one quarter to the next, or from halftime to the final score. In that case, the person with that square wins both prizes. The odds of winning are simple, too. Each square represents a 1/100 probability of winning. As long as all the entry fees go into the prize pool, a football betting pool like this is a game with no house edge. If you play in enough of these contests long enough, you’ll eventually break even. This is a fun way to host a football betting pool.
I like survivor pools even more. (They’re also called “last man standing” pools.) In this kind of pool, everyone contributes money to the prize pool. This can be $1, $5, $10, $25—whatever you guys agree to. All that money goes into the pot. Each week, you pick the winner for one game. If your pick loses, you’re out. If you team wins, you survive into the next week. Eventually, only one player will still be in it. When that happens, the last man standing wins all the prize money.
In most survivor pools, you can only pick a team once during the season. I’ve played in some survivor pools which didn’t have that restriction, though. Either way, it’s harder than you think to stay in it. It’s possible, but unlikely, for multiple players to survive the entire season. In that case, they divide the prize money equally.
I’ve also played in survivor pools where the last 2 or 3 players decided to “chop the pot,” so to speak. They just decide they want to split the prize pool. I don’t think most people have a problem with this, but some might. If you want to have a rule against that, then by all means, institute such a rule. (There’s nothing to prevent the final 2 players from colluding behind your back, though.)
You’ll be surprised at how quickly a survivor pool ends. I’ve been involved in survivor pools at my local bar where they ended early enough that we managed to have 2 or 3 survivor pools per season. I like this type of betting pool because of the skill element. I always think that having a skill element makes gambling more interesting and fun.
At 1st glance, you might think a pick’em pool is the same thing as a survivor pool, but it’s actually a little bit different. In a pickem pool, everyone contributes a certain amount of money toward the prize pool. They then pick a winner for every game that’s being played in a given week. The participant who gets the most winners picked correctly wins the prize pool. With more players, the likelihood of a tie increases. That’s okay. You just split the money between the players who tied. Alternatively, you could have the player who picked a particular game right be the winner if the other one got it wrong.
A few years ago, I met a beautiful young woman who worked at a car dealership. She liked me and was looking for an excuse to interact with me, so she asked me to help her make her picks for the pickem pool at work. I liked her, too, and I was trying to impress her, so I called my buddy who writes the “Last Man Standing” column. He helped me make the picks.
Out of 17 games, I got 14 games wrong. She would have won her office pool if she had just chosen the opposing team for every game I picked. Most of the time, with a pick’em pool, you don’t take into account the point spread. You just pick the winners.
Football isn’t the only thing you can bet on with a sports book, and it’s not the only thing you can host a betting pool on. Entertainment awards are also a popular betting activity. Political elections are also popular. (I think betting on the outcome of an election in the United States is illegal, though, so be careful with this one.)
I’ll give you an example of a betting pool based on the Oscars. We used to do this every year when I hosted my Oscars party, by the way. You print out a ballot for each participant, and he picks who he thinks will win each category. You give scores for picking certain categories correctly. Usually picking the major awards correctly results in greater points gains. For example, choosing who wins Best Picture is usually worth 10 points, while choosing Best Actor or Best Actress is only worth 7 points each. The really minor awards, like Best Animated Short, are only worth 5 points.
Everyone contributes money toward the prize pool, and the player with the highest score at the end of the night wins. The last time we hosted an Oscar watching party, my buddy John won the Oscars pool. He’d seen none of the movies, didn’t even like movies, and didn’t especially know much about movies. He’s a savvy guy, though, and he did some research before making his picks.
You can find plenty of critics who like to pick Oscar winners, too. They can help inform your choices. And that’s just one example of another type of betting pool you can host.
The most common kind of football betting pool in the United States is the fantasy football league. This means of having a football pool is more complicated than any other. In a season-long fantasy football league, you recruit maybe a dozen players. You then schedule a draft, where each player gets to choose members of his team. Depending on the scoring rules for the league, those players’ performances during the games determine their scores each week.
You also have a schedule for the season, where your fantasy team competes with your opponent’s fantasy team. Make no mistake. Fantasy football is an involved activity that can take enormous amounts of time. It’s also very much a game of skill. This isn’t to ignore the chance aspect of it, but you should keep in mind that when a game involves both chance and skill, the winners in the long run are always the more skilled players.
You can find all kinds of options for running a fantasy football league. In fact, you could write and/or read entire books on the subject. It’s almost so much its own activity that it doesn’t count as a betting pool. I have friends who play in multiple fantasy football leagues every year just for bragging rights. I’ve never understood that. Without money on the line, I just don’t see much point in it. Maybe I’m the weird one, though.
Betting pools, even ones where the administrator doesn’t make a profit, are illegal in many jurisdictions throughout the United States. It’s your responsibility to know what the laws are and how they apply to you. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t advise you, other than to offer the generic advice that it’s always a good idea to obey the laws where you live.
I also know that some of my writers aren’t worried about whether something is legal. They’re more interested in whether they’ll get arrested and/or prosecuted. It’s my personal, non-professional opinion that in most jurisdictions, with most small-stakes betting pools, the likelihood of facing legal action is practically non-existent. How that works in other countries is anybody’s guess. I have a friend who worked in the Middle East for years. He’s not even allowed to play chess, much less gamble on football. They take it seriously there, too.
I’d be remiss in my duty of keeping you informed if I didn’t at least point out that there is a legal aspect to these kinds of activities. So keep that in mind when you’re setting something like this up. Maybe don’t invite your buddy who works on the vice squad at your local police department.
My favorite, though, is the last man standing (or survivor) pool. It requires the least maintenance. I also think it has the highest skill element to time required ratio. Fantasy football leagues are fun, too, but I just don’t have the time for that kind of thing anymore. Fantasy football is just too much of a commitment. If you enjoy running betting pools, don’t forget that you can do so for other activities, too. I loved hosting my annual Oscars pool. You might enjoy it, too.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
