50 square football pool
Half a grid for half a room. Ten columns keep one digit each, the five rows carry two apiece, and every square covers two of the hundred score endings instead of one.
The grid
| Home →↓ Away | 4 | 5 | 0 | 6 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | ||||||||||
| 01 | ||||||||||
| 38 | ||||||||||
| 95 | ||||||||||
| 46 |
Draw seed 481625 · each square covers 2 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.
Where the halving happens
Only one axis is folded. The columns still hold a single digit each, exactly as they do on the full grid, and the compression is done entirely by the rows: five rows, two digits printed in each. A square wins if the column digit matches one team and either of its row digits matches the other.
Folding one axis rather than both is what keeps this layout feeling like the real thing. The columns still discriminate perfectly, so a close game still moves square to square across the sheet rather than jumping in blocks the way a twenty-five square grid does.
The two digits in a row are whatever the shuffle put next to each other. They are not a matched pair, not both lucky or both dead, and there is no way to arrange them so they would be — which is the honest answer to the person who asks why their row has 2 and 5 in it.
The trade you are making
Each square is twice as likely to win as a square on the full grid, and there are half as many of them. Those two facts cancel exactly, so nobody is being short-changed relative to a hundred-square pool — a square here is worth two squares there, and it should cost accordingly.
What you lose is resolution. Because a row spans two digits, two different scorelines that would have paid different people on a full grid now pay the same person, and the room notices when that happens twice in a row to the same square.
Printing a 50-square sheet
50 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: 50 squares, digits drawn. each square covers 2 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.
Because the rows carry two digits each, print the drawn sheet at full size rather than shrinking it to fit a half-page. Two digits squeezed into one row header is the single hardest thing to read on this layout, and it is the thing every quarter gets settled against.
Common questions
How does a 50 square grid work with only 10 digits?
The ten digits are shared out two to a row across five rows. Your square wins when the column digit matches one team's last digit and either of the two digits on your row matches the other team's.
Is a 50 square pool as fair as 100 squares?
Yes, in the sense that every square covers the same number of outcomes as every other square in the grid — two each. It is less precise, not less fair: fewer squares means each one wins more often.
Can I use a 50-square grid for every quarter?
Yes — one draw covers all four quarters by default, and each of the 50 squares covers 2 score endings in every one of them. Redrawing between quarters is a separate option if your group prefers it.