100 square football pool
The full grid: ten columns, ten rows, and exactly one of the hundred possible score endings in every square. It needs a hundred people, and it is the only layout where nobody has to share.
The grid
| Home →↓ Away | 4 | 5 | 0 | 6 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 9 |
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Draw seed 481625 · each square covers 1 of the 100 score endings
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The digits are drawn
Not left blank for you to write in, and the seed prints on the sheet so anybody can check the draw.
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It says which digits pay
Scores are built out of threes and sevens, so the digits worth having are shaded on the paper.
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Nothing is uploaded
It all runs in your browser, and a shared link carries the sheet in the part a server never receives.
One square, one score ending
A ten-by-ten grid maps perfectly onto the problem. There are a hundred ways the last digits of the two scores can come out, and there are a hundred squares, so each square owns precisely one of them. No square covers two outcomes and no outcome is covered twice.
That exactness is why this is the layout every other one is measured against. When a pool of forty people uses a fifty-square grid instead, what they are doing is taking this grid and letting each row stand for two digits — a compromise made because the room was not big enough, not because it improves anything.
It also means a hundred names. A grid with empty squares still works, but the empty ones can win, and an organiser who has not decided in advance what happens then will be deciding it in front of everybody at half-time.
Filling a hundred squares without a spreadsheet
Type the names one per line and they fill the grid in reading order, left to right and down. A blank line stays blank rather than closing up, because an unsold square in the middle of a sold grid is information — losing it would quietly move everybody after it into a different square.
Names are cut at twenty-four characters so that a long one cannot stretch a column and throw the whole sheet out of square on the printer. If your group uses initials, three letters in a ten-by-ten grid stays readable across a room, which a full name at this size does not.
Printing a 100-square sheet
100 squares across 10 columns prints landscape on both Letter and A4 without the type shrinking below what a room can read from a few feet away. The page furniture — navigation, headings, this paragraph — is dropped from the printed sheet.
The status line under the grid always states the arithmetic for the sheet you are looking at: 100 squares, digits drawn. each square covers 1 of the 100 possible score endings. That figure is read out of the same code that builds the grid, so it cannot drift away from what is actually printed.
Two prints, and the second one matters more than people expect. The sheet you print after the draw carries the seed, so it is the document that settles any argument in February about whether the numbers were really random.
Common questions
How many people do you need for a 100 square pool?
Up to a hundred, and they do not have to be a hundred different people — one person can hold several squares. What matters is that every square is spoken for before the digits are drawn, so decide in advance who owns any that are left.
Can two squares win the same quarter?
Not on a full grid. Every score ending belongs to exactly one square, so each quarter has exactly one winning square, which is the property the ten-by-ten layout exists to give you.
Can I use a 100-square grid for every quarter?
Yes — one draw covers all four quarters by default, and each of the 100 squares covers 1 score ending in every one of them. Redrawing between quarters is a separate option if your group prefers it.