How to Play (And Win!) the Squares Game for Super Bowl LVIII

Super Bowl squares are a great gateway to NFL gambling. Participants don’t need to know anything about the teams involved to join in the fun. All they need is a few dollars and the ability to write their name or initials in one of one hundred boxes. Then they just sit back and wait.

It’s simple. Someone takes a piece of paper and makes a grid of 100 boxes. (That’s 10 by 10. If you need help with that, check out this video from the Numberblocks.) Then a dollar value is assigned to the boxes, depending on how serious people are about gambling. A dollar. Five dollars. Ten dollars. The only thing limiting the prize pool is the affluence of the guest list. Serious gamblers may have already purchased a high-price square in a legal – or even illegal! – pot elsewhere.

Once the squares are filled, numbers 0-9 are randomly assigned across the horizontal and vertical axis. However has the last number of each score following each quarter wins. Generally, it’s a large prize for the final score, a medium prize for the halftime score and smaller payouts for the first and third quarters, but it’s really up to whoever is in charge. You can even do a prize for the person with the opposite numbers after each quarter, which in theory is more fun for everyone involved!

Generally, squares with some combination of 0, 1, 3, 4, and 7 are the best. You know, traditional football scores. Seven of the last 12 Super Bowls have ended with some combination of those digits. But 9, 8 and 5 have all found their way into final scores in the last few years. Really, nothing is off the table and with coaches relying on analytics to make decisions, weird scores should be in play more now than they’ve ever been. Just three years ago the Chiefs and Bucs played a game that had quarters ending with 7-3 / 1-6 / 1-9 and 1-9.

The best strategy for winning Super Bowl squares is actually pretty easy. Simply wait until the day of the Big Game and organize the contest yourself. If you can wait until people show up at your house for a party, that’s even better. Guests will be happy to give you money and pick boxes for their chance at winning, but interest – and funds – will decrease as the game gets closer.

You can go around the room again. You can cut the price. It doesn’t matter. By the time the National Anthem is being performed you’ll be scrambling to fill the empty boxes and will eventually have to buy up any empty real estate yourself in a desperate attempt to not have to issue refunds.

Once you’ve written your name on 20-50 spare squares, it’s time to draw the numbers and let all the people who aren’t sweating having to come up with half the pot know their numbers. Should your numbers actually hit, not only will guests be disappointed they just missed, but they’ll also be quietly annoyed that the person who picked the numbers somehow won all the money. By the time the fourth quarter is over and you’ve hopefully recouped your money, you’ll have declared that you’re not doing this again next year. You will, of course, do this again next year.