How to play Super Bowl squares
Squares is the simplest football pool there is. Nobody needs to know anything about football, every square has the same chance before the numbers are drawn, and it takes one sheet of paper.
The five steps
Print a grid. The standard grid is 10 × 10, 100 squares. Write one team across the top and the other down the side.
Fill the squares. Each person writes a name or initials in as many squares as they are taking. Keep going until the grid is full.
Draw the numbers. Once the grid is full, give each column a different digit from 0 to 9 at random, then do the same for the rows.
Check each quarter. At the end of a quarter, take the last digit of each team's score. If it is 17–10, that is 7 and 0. Find the 7 column for the team on top and the 0 row for the team on the side. The square where they cross wins.
Pay out. Most pools pay four times: after the first quarter, at halftime, after the third quarter and at the final score.
How the pot is usually split
There is no official rule. The two splits used most are 20% / 20% / 20% / 40%, which puts the big prize on the final score, and 25% four times. With 100 squares at $5 the pot is $500, so the first split pays $100, $100, $100 and $200.
Which numbers win
Football scores move mostly in 3s and 7s, so some last digits come up far more often than others. Across 7,276 NFL games from 1999 to 2025, this is how often a team's final score ended in each digit:
| Last digit | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of scores | 17% | 9.8% | 4.2% | 13.1% | 14% | 4.3% | 8.7% | 16.8% | 6.5% | 5.6% |
The best single squares for the final score were 0–7 (3.57%), 4–7 (3.26%), 0–3 (3.21%); the worst was 2–2 (0.05%). An average square wins 1% of the time. This is exactly why numbers are drawn after the grid is full: nobody gets to choose.
Smaller groups
If 100 squares is too many to fill, use a 50-square board (each row carries two digits) or a 25-square board (every row and column carries two). Every possible score still lands on a square.
Print a grid
Questions
What are Super Bowl squares?
A pool played on a 10 × 10 grid. Each of the 100 squares belongs to one person, each column and row gets a random digit from 0 to 9, and the last digit of each team's score at the end of each quarter picks the winning square.
When do you draw the numbers?
Only after every square has a name in it. Drawing first lets people avoid the weak numbers, and the grid never fills.
What if the game goes to overtime?
The final-score payout uses the score when the game ends, overtime included. The fourth-quarter score only matters if your pool pays a separate fourth-quarter prize, which most do not.
What happens to squares nobody takes?
Decide before the draw. The usual choices are to roll that quarter's prize into the next one, or give it to the final-score winner. A smaller 50 or 25 square grid avoids the problem.
Pools played for money are regulated differently from place to place; check the rules where you live.