Hey everyone! Given that squares pools have been pretty successful here, I wanted to throw an idea out. A friend of a friend posted this on facebook, and it sounded like something that may have interest here.

Basically, I would pick 1 NFL team, and make a squares pool for the 20 game season (3 preseason, 17 regular season) and payout after each game. The pool he posted has half of the squares blacked out, to potentially have higher payouts because if the final score lands on a blacked out square, the payout rolls to the next game. If there is enough interest, we could just do a full board also.

I was also thinking of a $20 per square price.
That would give a pot of either $1,000 or $2,000 depending on whether we do 50 or 100 squares. Each game pays out 1/20th of the pot, unless we use blackout squares in which case, again, the pot rolls to the next
week's payout.

So, my question is: Is there interest in this, and if so, do we want 50 or 100 squares?

If there is interest, I can either have someone randomize our team, or I can pick my favorite team to use. Final score would be our team across the top, and opponent down the side. We have plenty of time to fill a board if we start now, but I wanted to put it out there to gauge interest and go from there.

TL;DR but totally interested.

Love the idea of escrowing now, forgetting that I did it and receiving free $$ later.

Don't totally grasp the concept, but what happens in the blackout game if it rolls over for 2 weeks and the final game hits a blackout square?

The blackout square will cause a rollover until someone hits their square. Could be 1 week, 2 weeks, however long it takes.

If the final game lands on a blackout square, there are a few options. I'd obviously have it figured out before i started taking any money, but options include defaulting to the most recent winner, splitting equally between anyone who has previously won a square, or splitting between whomever has the squares surrounding the blackout square. There is 1 other option, which will take some work, but could be fun. A template is made with arrows under each blackout square, and if the final winner is a blackout square, the arrow under the square will point to the winning square.

It's basically similar to the ncaa pool, except we are following 1 specific nfl team over 20 games.

OK. You are following 1 team. What are the other 15/31 players following. What exactly does the board look like each week. Does each player get their own team???

You said your team is on top. Are we doing multiple boards for each team?

1 board. The winners are based on the outcome of 1 team's final score each week.

Example: Our team is dallas. Each week, starting with the preseason, the final score of the dallas game determines the winning square. If the score is dallas 24, opponent 17, the winning square would be 4 across the top, 7 down the side. Dallas would be the team we follow, so their number is across the top. There is no payout on their bye week.

Blacked out squares would rollover to the following week, except the final game, which would have a plan in place for paying out if it lands on a blacked out square. If there are consecutive blackout squares, someone might get a 3x payout.

Instead of one random team just do [Sunday] night football home /away and include the 3 playoff weeks instead of preseason.

I’m in, think boxes should be at least $100.

Best idea so far. I don't want to follow 1 team. And a hundo is good.

Then you could roll into the Super Bowl w each blank square going to the prior square owner if necessary.

While I appreciate starting the pool early, I hate pre-season football and refuse to watch. I wholeheartedly support nixing the pre-season and adding post season. Sunday night game instead of a single team. I'm not super into the blackout/rollover part. Too degen. Pretty sure we could sell out $100/sq., but I'm cheap and would also enjoy $20/sq. 2 pools?

Just my $.02.

Especially the damn Cowboys.

I’m down for whatever. But agree with AzO1. Nix the pre-season.

If we do that, it would be 2 weeks of playoffs as there are 18 regular season weeks.
Doable, I suppose. Home/away is definitely ideal in case of a tie.

I'm willing to run 2 pools, but i definitely want a $20 pool.

I appreciate the thought, but it'll end week 2 of the playoffs one way or another. I'm not going to roll it beyond that. I would prefer to have input from the options I gave, but if not, I'll pick one of them and be transparent before squares are purchased.

I'm in for whatever.

Still confused a bit on the format. Even if we do home and away, we randomize the squares once for the whole season? If I buy 1 square and get 5/2 I'm not going to enjoy a season long sweat.

Just make a decision on how you envision the game and put up a draft of what the OP would look like and let us decide from there or suggest tweaks.

I love me some reindeer games, but this sounds a little convoluted to me.

I'm in for something, but a $1.25 a week isn't something worth sweating. Especially when nobody knows what the **** the rules are.

Post submitted with details. Thanks for the feedback.

Typical squares pool, just goes for a whole season rather than 1 game. Submitted a post with details. Payouts were never $1.25 per week so not sure where that came from.

Whatever
No consideration for reranding every week? Maybe even every 4 games? Unlike the MM squares, all numbers are a long way from equal in football and it would really suck to end up with shitty numbers.

txdome probably forgot it's a 17 game season now, lol. $20/16games=$1.25wk

This. I'll probably take 5 of the 20s to spread the risk of getting bad numbers, but likely out on getting 1 or 2 of the 100s.

I think most people will get multiple 20s, so set it and forget it would be fine. But for the 100, I would much prefer re-randomizing every 4-5 games. Then I'm in.

My only other experience with this kind of pool, you had the same square location on each board, but they randomized the numbers each week. This seems right to me.

Re-randomizing isn't a bad idea, and I'm up for it, so long as everyone who has already claimed squares is okay with it. Maybe every 4 games? The issue there is finding someone not involved to randomize the numbers, since the board is already set and everyone can see where their squares are.

The upside is that over the course of 20 games, weird **** is much more likely to happen than in just 1 game, meaning the 2/5 squares have a little better chances than usual.

I'll 2nd that motion. Should be quick and easy to just randomize the numbers.

Right, as I stated above, my concern is finding a 3rd party to randomize since the board will already be known after the first time. Or.....we could ranomize them all in advance to alleviate that issue.

Now you're thinking. Up front great idea.