Official Squares rules

A board is a ten by ten grid: one hundred squares. The columns belong to the home team and the rows to the away team.

Every square is also numbered 1 to 100, left to right and top to bottom. That number is only a label so people can say which square they mean. It has nothing to do with winning.

The host sets how many squares one entry buys: one, two, four, five or ten. The entry fee is the price of that whole block, not the price of a single square.

The pot is the entry fee multiplied by the number of entries the board holds. A board sold in blocks of four at ten dollars an entry is twenty-five entries and a two hundred and fifty dollar pot.

Pool Prophet takes nothing from the pot. The whole amount is paid out according to the split the host published when the board was created.

The digits along both axes are drawn at random the moment the hundredth square is bought, and not before. Each axis gets its own independent shuffle of the digits 0 through 9.

They are drawn exactly once and never drawn again, for any reason. Until they appear, every square shows a question mark and nobody, including the host, knows which digits they are buying. That is the point of the game: every square is worth the same when it is sold.

Claiming a square authorizes your card for the entry, which verifies it and sets the money aside. Nobody is charged until the board is full. Cards are charged once all one hundred squares are committed.

While a checkout is open, the squares in it are held for ten minutes. If the checkout is not finished in that time the hold lapses and those squares go back on the board for anybody to take.

If a board never fills, the authorizations are released and nobody is charged anything.

Entries close at the lock time the host set when creating the board, which is on or before kickoff.

A board that reaches its lock time without filling has twenty-four hours for the host to sort it out. After that it is cancelled, every authorization is released, and nobody is charged.

At the end of each scoring period, take the last digit of each team’s running score — the total for the game so far, not the points scored in that period alone. Find the home team’s digit along the top and the away team’s digit down the side. The square where they meet wins that period.

A team on 17 uses the 7. A team on 20 uses the 0. A team on 3 uses the 3.

The same square can win more than one period, and each one pays separately. A quiet second quarter where neither side scores means the first quarter winner takes halftime as well.

For football and basketball the four slices are the first quarter, halftime, the third quarter and the final. Halftime is the running score after two quarters, so it is a real payout, not a break.

The host chooses what “final” means before anybody buys a square, and the board shows the choice:

• End of game settles on the score after overtime, if overtime is played.
• End of regulation settles on the score at the end of the fourth quarter. Overtime is played but cannot move this payout.

New boards can be built on NFL and NBA games. Both spread their scores across all ten digits, so every square on the board has a genuine chance.

Hockey and baseball are not offered. Those games are usually settled in low single figures, so sevens, eights and nines almost never come up and a large part of the board is dead the moment it is drawn — while the people holding those squares paid the same as everybody else.

While the game is on, the board marks each period as it ends and shows which square the score is currently sitting on. Those are unofficial. They come straight from the live scoring feed, and a feed that corrects itself will move them.

Results become official shortly after the game is final, once the score has settled. That is the moment winnings are credited, and an official result is not revised afterwards.

A postponement is a fixture with a new date attached, not the end of it, so the board follows the game. The squares stay with the people who bought them and the drawn digits stay exactly as they are. Nothing is re-drawn and nobody loses their square.

The lock time moves with the kickoff. If the board had not filled, it goes back to taking entries until the new lock, which gives it a chance to fill rather than leaving it stranded at ninety squares.

A host who would rather not wait can call the board off instead, and then nobody is charged.

There are only two ways this ends, and which one is not up to us. A league that stops a game either declares the shortened game official, or it reschedules it.

If the game is declared official, whatever the score was when it was called, the board settles on it normally. Every period pays out as usual.

If it is rescheduled, the board follows it as in the section above, and settles when it is eventually played.

If it is never played at all — not resumed and not rescheduled within seven days — the whole board is called off. Nobody wins anything, because nothing was won, and every entry goes back to the person who paid it. That includes a club or charity share: a pot that is being given back is not a pot to take a share of.

Boards are never settled half way. A game does not finish with two quarters paid and two refunded, because a league does not leave a game half played.

Entries come back as Pool Prophet balance rather than to your card. See Winnings for what that currently means.

A host may set aside part of the pot for a club, team or charity, and must name the recipient when they do. The share and the recipient are shown on the board before anybody buys a square.

The host sends that money themselves and records where it went. Pool Prophet does not move it and cannot confirm it arrived, which is why anybody who played can flag a report that looks wrong.

Winnings are credited to your balance when a board settles, and so is an entry returned on a game that was never played. Every line that got you there is listed on it.

Cashing out is not built yet. Until it is, settling up happens directly between you and your host, and your balance is the record of what you are owed.

Scores come from a public scoreboard feed and feeds are occasionally wrong or late. If a board has settled on a score that does not match the official result, tell your host. Corrections are made by hand.

These rules can change. Any change applies to boards created after it; a board already taking entries keeps the rules it was created under.