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BracketPrintout

Blank football squares

The sell sheet. Every square, both team names, empty strips where the digits will go — and deliberately no numbers, because the numbers are what you draw after the last square is taken.

The pool

Teams, colours and what prints on the sheet

These are printed onto the sheet as you type them. Nothing is collected or paid here — whatever your group plays for is settled between the people in the room.

Paste a list of names
The list fills the grid left to right. A blank line leaves that square unsold.

100 squares, no digits yet. Sell every square first, then draw — each one will cover 1 of the 100 possible score endings.

The grid

1 sheet · landscape · Letter or A4 · header, navigation and ads removed

Home across the top, Away down the side
Home →↓ Away                    
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            

Not drawn yet — sell every square, then draw.

Printed on the sheet. Type the same number to reproduce the same draw.
The whole grid travels inside the link. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed — the part after the # never reaches a server.
Who won a break?

Type a score to highlight the winning square.

Check this before you rely on it. This squares grid is provided free and without warranty, and its results are not professional advice. This site prints a sheet of paper: it takes no entry money, holds no pot and settles nothing.

Why the blank sheet is the important one

It is tempting to treat this as the lesser version of the grid, the one you print when the tool has not finished. It is the opposite. This is the sheet the pool is actually sold on, and every fairness property the game has comes from the fact that this sheet has no digits on it.

A person choosing a square from a blank grid is choosing at random whether they mean to or not. That is the point. Once digits are showing, choosing is a skill — a small one, but real enough that the 0, 3 and 7 columns will be gone within the hour and the argument at the end will be about who had access to the sheet first.

What is already on it

Both team names, the full grid at the size you chose, the quarter labels, and blank strips along the top and the left edge. The strips are drawn rather than left as whitespace so that the digits, when they arrive, land in a place the sheet has visibly reserved for them — a grid that grows an extra row when the numbers are added is a grid people stop trusting.

There is space for a name in every cell at a size a felt-tip can manage. That sounds trivial and is not: a sell sheet whose cells are sized for 8pt type comes back from a party unreadable, and the person transcribing it at midnight is you.

Decide about the empty cells before they matter

Very few pools sell out, and an unsold cell can win a break like any other. The moment to settle what happens then is now, while nobody knows which cells those will be — an organiser improvising that rule at half-time is an organiser being accused of inventing it to suit somebody.

The three answers groups actually use: the organiser covers the empty cells and takes the winnings, the money for that break rolls into the next one, or the sheet is closed at whatever is sold and the unsold cells are struck out before the draw. All three are fine. Choosing one in front of everybody, in advance, is what matters.

Striking cells out has one wrinkle worth knowing. Removing cells does not remove score endings — the digits still get drawn across all ten columns and rows — so a struck-out cell simply means that particular ending pays nobody. That is the same outcome as the organiser covering it, minus the money.

Common questions

Where are the numbers on this grid?

Deliberately absent. This is the sheet you print to sell the squares; the digits get drawn once every square is taken, and printing them now would let people pick the good squares.

Can I write the numbers in by hand afterwards?

You can, and plenty of pools do — pull digits out of a hat and write them along the edges. Drawing them here instead gives you a printed seed, which is what lets somebody who was not in the room confirm the draw was not arranged.

The other tools