Every office has one. The spreadsheet nobody can open on their phone, the
grid taped to the fridge, and one poor soul chasing eleven people for twenty dollars. Here is the version
that takes ten minutes and does not end in an argument.01
SQUARES
Boxes · Grid pool
Q3 · 14 – 20grid locked
Week 6 · 16 gamespicks locking
Week 124 alive
Daily · 5 leaguesday 1
STREAK 0
YOU WON
Your square just hit at the end of the third.
That is the whole product, playing out: a square hitting at the end of the third, a name climbing a pick’em board, twenty-three entries getting knocked out one by one, and eight straight days of picking winners. Four different games, four different kinds of nervous.
Why the office pool refuses to die
Fantasy football takes a draft, a season of waiver claims and someone quitting in week four. An office pool takes about a minute to set up and everybody understands it immediately. Your accounts team will play squares. Your boss will play squares. The person who has never watched a down of football in their life will play squares and probably beat you, because the numbers are drawn after the grid fills and skill has nothing to do with it.
The four formats below cover almost every office pool ever run. They are all free to set up on FantasyDailies office pools Browse open pools, they all grade themselves off real results, and none of them involve us touching a cent of anybody’s money.
The four formats
💀 Survivor
Knockout · Survival pool · Eliminator · Last man standingPick one team a week to win. Get it right and you go through. Get it wrong and you are done for the season. The catch that makes it a game rather than a coin flip: you only get each team once. Spend Kansas City in week two and they are gone in December when you need them.
Most people who go out in week ten did not lose to an upset. They lost because they had nothing left worth picking.
- PicksOne a week
- DeadlineFirst kickoff
- Wrong pickYou are out
- Runs18 weeks
🏈 Super Bowl squares
Super Bowl box · Boxes · Box pool · Grid pool · Block poolA ten by ten grid. Everybody claims boxes with their name. Once it fills, the numbers are drawn at random along both axes, and the last digit of each team’s score at the end of each quarter decides who collects.
Nobody can pick a good square, because the numbers do not exist when you choose. That is the entire design, and it is why squares gets a whole office playing rather than the four people who follow football. It works on any game with a score — Monday night, Thanksgiving, a playoff round, or a regular Sunday in October.
- Grid100 or 25 boxes
- NumbersDrawn at kickoff
- PaysEvery quarter
- Skill neededNone at all
🎯 Pick’em
Pick em · The classic office football poolEveryone picks a winner in every game. Most correct at the end takes it. Nobody gets knocked out, which is the point — the colleague who goes 4–12 in week one is still turning up in week six, and still talking about it.
Ties get settled on the Monday night total, which is where a surprising number of these are actually decided. Guess a slightly odd number rather than a round one; everybody writes 45 and 50.
- PicksThe whole slate
- Length1 week to a season
- KnockoutsNone
- TiebreakMonday night
⚾🏀🏒 The Gauntlet
Daily survivor · NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and MLSSurvivor, but every single day, across whatever is in season. One pick, any league, lose and you are out. It is the only one of the four that keeps an office going through July, when the NFL is six weeks away and there is nothing to talk about.
The strategy is different too. In a normal survivor pool you choose a team; here you choose a sport first. A strong basketball side is a far safer pick than a strong baseball one, because baseball is the most random regular-season sport there is.
- PicksOne a day
- LeaguesFive
- Team rest7 days
- EndsDate you set
Which one should you run?
Depends entirely on your office, and getting this wrong is the most common reason a pool dies in week three.
- Big office, mixed interest, one big game? Squares, every time. No knowledge needed, everybody plays, and it is over in an afternoon.
- People who actually watch football? Survivor. It generates the most conversation per pound of effort, and the eliminations are brutal enough to be funny.
- Want everyone involved all season? Pick’em. Nobody gets knocked out in September and stops caring.
- Want something running year round? The gauntlet. It is the only format that does not go dark in the summer.
The bit nobody tells you: collecting the money
This is where office pools actually go wrong. Not the rules — the chasing.
FantasyDailies is deliberately non-custodial. We never hold, transfer or process a penny. Buy-ins are counted in sardines rather than dollars, and players settle up directly however they already do: Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, a twenty in an envelope. What the commissioner gets is a private ledger — who has paid, who has not, what each person owes — plus one-tap reminders they can send individually.
Nobody else can see it. Who has paid is between each player and the commissioner.
It is not on the pool page, it is not in the standings, and it never appears in the message board.
Every pool prints its own poster
When you create a pool you get a printable flyer with the real name, the real buy-in, and a QR code that actually works. Print it, tape it to the wall by the kettle, and people join by pointing a phone at it. No invite list, no app, no chasing anyone for an email address.
And the rules write themselves
Every pool generates its own rulebook from your settings, not a generic page. Two strikes and buy-backs through week six? That is exactly what your players read, and what they can print out and hand round. Nobody argues about a rule nobody agreed to, and every pool records its own winners and what each is owed when it finishes.
Set up your office pool
Free · about a minute · we never touch the money
Learn to win one
- How to win a survivor pool — managing your teams, planning three weeks out, and when to break from the crowd
- How to win Super Bowl squares — why 0, 7 and 3 win most, why 2, 5 and 9 rarely do, and what a commissioner actually controls
- How to win a pick em pool — when to take every favourite and when being different is the only way
- How to win a daily survivor pool — which league to shop in each night, and why baseball is the trap
And if you want the rules of a format before you commit: survivor rules, squares rules, pick’em rules, gauntlet rules.
Office pools on FantasyDailies are peer-to-peer. The platform provides the tools and never holds, transfers or processes any money — buy-ins are counted in sardines and settled directly between players. Check the rules where you live before running a pool with a buy-in. 21+. If gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER.