ATLANTA — Among the many side-attractions that accompany the Super Bowl -- following the commercials, offbeat prop bets, seeing how many times they show Taylor Swift on TV -- a longtime favorite among them is the squares game.
Whether it's for your friends and family, part of an office pool, a youth sports team fundraiser or any other reason, the way the squares game works gives anyone a chance to have a Super Bowl rooting interest.
Which brings us, naturally, to the question: How do Super Bowl squares work?
Here's an overview:
How do Super Bowl squares work?
It's fairly simple -- you take the final score of the Super Bowl, use the second digit of each score (so, say, it's 35-28, you'd use 5 and 8) and the way the numbers are arranged for each team on a 10x10 grid will give you a single square with the winning combination.
So, again using 35-28 as an example, let's say the Chiefs win 35-28 - you'd take the "5" square for the Chiefs and the "8" square for the 49ers, whoever in your pool owns that square wins.
Now there are a couple different ways to line up your 10x10 grid, but first you actually need one. You can see how those look below (normally the home team, this year the Chiefs, is given the top-line numbers while the away team, the 49ers, gets the left-side numbers.)
Then what?
They need to be numbered 0-9. There are two ways you can choose to do that.
- Assign them randomly: This is the more popular way to run it. Basically, randomly generate which columns and rows get which numbers. It allows you to have people enter your pool knowing the number combinations they'll land on will be entirely random.
- Simply list them out 0-9: This would mean people know which square they're choosing at the time they choose it. Obviously, this makes some squares more desirable - a football game is a lot more likely to end 17-14 than it is 29-19, so your 7/4 squares are going to be more desirable than your 9/9 squares. This post on X illustrates the "value" of each square. This is a less popular way to run squares, and usually requires a kind of auction system for the more "valuable" squares, but it's certainly not uncommon.
Anything else?
As you can see in one of the example grids further up, another twist you can bring to your squares game is to essentially split it in two by having a first-half score winner and an end-of-game score winner.
This means that, say, the end of the first half is 21-14 Chiefs, your person with the Chiefs 1/49ers 4 combo would win the first half. Then if the game ended 35-20 Chiefs, a different person -- with the Chiefs 5/49ers 0 square, would win the end-of-game prize.
That it?
Pretty much! Once you've chosen how to format your game and filled out your grid for everyone to see, it's just a matter of seeing how the score winds up lining up!