What Pick'em is

Every week your league gets the same slate of games. Everyone picks spreads, totals and moneylines against real odds and submits before kickoff. When the games end, the scores come in and the picks grade themselves — no spreadsheet, no commissioner doing math on a Monday morning.

Points post to a live leaderboard, the weekly recap goes out, trophies get handed to whoever earned them, and the argument in the chat gets an actual answer.

Every league is built on one of three formats. They change what people do each week, not how much control you have — that part is the same either way.

• Pick'em. The default. Everyone fills out the same ballot each week — spreads, totals and moneylines against real odds — and the highest score wins. Most leagues also run a Lock of the Week, where one pick a week carries multiplied points.
• Survivor. One straight-up winner a week, never the same team twice. Lose and you're out, unless the league plays with extra lives. Last one standing takes it.
• Sportsbook. Everyone starts with the same points balance and puts points behind each pick. Winners pay out at real odds, so one brave call can matter more than ten safe ones, and standings rank by who grew their points the most. There is no money in it at any point — see below.

A pick'em league can run a survivor pool alongside the weekly ballot. Everyone plays both at once: you are chasing points on the slate while carrying a life you can only lose. A good scoring week and an elimination can land on the same Sunday, which is a different kind of season than either format on its own.

The commissioner sets what surviving is worth each week, how many lives everyone starts with, and how many bonus points the last one standing carries into the season standings.

Almost everything. There is no house ruleset that every league has to accept.

• The ballot. How many picks each week, and which pick types are on them.
• Scoring. What each slot on the ballot is worth — a hard pick can pay three times an easy one.
• Lock of the Week. Whether players can back one pick a week for multiplied points, and what the multiplier is. Defaults to 2×, and can be switched off.
• Points balance. In sportsbook leagues: how many points everyone starts the season with, the smallest and largest amount that can go on one pick, and whether parlays are allowed.
• Parlays. Two to ten picks in one entry. The odds multiply, every leg must land, and a pushed leg drops out and pays at the remaining odds.
• Pushes. A pick that lands exactly on the number scores half rather than nothing.
• Deadlines. Each pick locks at its own kickoff, so a late game stays open after an early one has started.
• Tiebreak. Level on points, the win goes to whoever picked the biggest underdog that came in.

The ballot is a minute a week. Most of what makes a league worth being in happens around it.

• A winner every week. Top score takes the week and keeps a Week N Champ badge for it, so a season is eighteen chances to win something rather than one.
• Achievements. Awarded automatically as picks grade — On Fire for three weeks running, Contrarian King for winning with a pick almost nobody made, Fortune Teller for beating the consensus twice in a week. And the ones nobody wants: Sheep, for following ninety per cent of the league into a loss, and Perfectly Wrong, for getting every single pick wrong.
• Weekly recaps. The week's champion, every pick and how it landed, and the trends across the league — ready without anyone writing it.
• Your own stats. Win, loss and push records split by pick type, and how often your Lock of the Week actually lands. It is usually the fastest way to find out that you are much better at one kind of pick than you thought, and much worse at another.
• League and team stats. Every team's record against the spread and the margin they beat it by, pooled across every league on the app.
• Chat. League chat next to the standings, and direct messages for the rest.
• Reminders. An email before picks lock, push notifications on your phone, and one-click unsubscribe on every email.

Pick'em runs NFL, college football, NBA and college basketball today. Each league is tied to one sport, and you can be in as many leagues as you like — a work league, a college one, and the group chat you can't leave — switching between them from the lobby.

Pick'em is not a sportsbook, including the format called Sportsbook. Nothing on the app can be bought, and nothing can be won. Points have no value outside your league: they cannot be purchased, deposited, withdrawn, transferred between players or exchanged for anything at all. Real odds and point spreads appear because they are the fairest way to price a pick — they are a scoring mechanism, not an invitation.

The app itself is free. No subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no ads.

Questions, bugs or feature requests go to support@pickem.fan. The support page covers the common ones.