Pick'em is not a solo leaderboard. It is private groups of friends picking winners off real slates — with the group page, the reminders, and the paid list handled here, and the money handled the way friends have always handled it: between themselves.
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Anyone with an account can create a group and gets a shareable invite link to text or email to the players they want. Say Jesse starts a group and sends the link to eight friends — they're in. Groups persist across weeks: the same crew plays all season.
The creator chooses the slate — weekly (every pro football game that week, for example) or daily (tonight's games) — and, in the daily sports, the term: tonight only, a few days, a full week, or one team's week. Slates cover all the major sports — pro football, pro basketball, pro baseball, pro hockey, and soccer — as their feeds land. The term menu ↓
For each game, pick who wins. Picks lock at that game's start; once locked, the whole group sees everyone's picks. Each player also saves a contact handle on their profile, so the group can actually reach each other.
The final game on the slate carries the tiebreaker: predict its total combined score. Closest prediction wins the tiebreak. Most correct picks wins the week or day, running standings keep the season score, and results post to the Board and your group page automatically.
Football's natural unit is the week. The daily sports run on a different clock — so when an organizer builds a slate, he picks the sport and the term. Whatever the term, the house rules don't change: picks lock at each game's start, and the final game on the slate carries the total-score tiebreaker.
Every game on tonight's slate. The original daily pool: in by dinner, settled by midnight.
Tonight and tomorrow night as one slate. A short race, built for groups that play in bursts.
The long-weekend rhythm: enough games to separate the field, few enough picks that nobody drowns.
Every game across a full week of the schedule. A standings race, not a sprint — for crews who genuinely want the grind.
Every game of a single team across its week — a home series, a road trip. Pick the Dodgers' week and live inside one schedule.
Chain shorter windows together, each one a round feeding a single longer standings race. Season-long stakes without picking every night.
Every game that week — the classic shape, and still the standard. The final game's total carries the tiebreaker.
Pick one team before the season; its results are your score all year. No weekly picks at all — you drafted a team, not a schedule.
The entire schedule picked in the preseason, then the standings evolve untouched. The boldest sheet in the house: set it in August and watch it age.
College football mirrors the weekly slate; the bowls are their own slate.
Every group gets a private page only its members can open — part group chat, part bulletin board. The trash talk lives there, the organizer's announcements live there, and weekly results post there automatically. That's the piece a bare pool form can never give you: pick'em alone is a Sunday-morning errand, but the group page is what brings everyone back on Tuesday to argue about Monday.
Organizers also get the tools that kill the annoying parts: automatic pick reminders so nobody has to chase anyone, one-tap weekly recaps, and co-commissioners.
Luka, the clubhouse SI, isn't watching your pool from the rail — he's in it, three ways. All three run on the same information any House member can ask him for. Nothing about him is an inside track, and nothing he picks is ever a "lock" — it's an opinion with its work shown.
On any game on your slate, tap Ask Luka right on the pick sheet — or ask him in chat. You get his pick, the sourced facts his read rests on, the one or two factors driving it, and where he disagrees with the market number. The Lab's first model prices live NFL game states — a different question from a pregame pick — so he never borrows its in-game percentage to dress up a pregame take; pregame takes run on honest tiers until a pregame model of their own ships. He'll also tell you plainly when a game is a coin flip — some weeks the right take is "pick your rooting interest."
The organizer can add Luka himself as a player in the group. His picks run on a transparent knowledge rule — the listed favorite, else the home team — labeled as knowledge picks, because the Lab's first model is an in-game win-probability model, not a pregame pick engine. He sits in the standings like anyone else — clearly labeled as the house player, never passed off as a person — and his record posts to your group page. Beating him becomes a season-long storyline. One hard rule: Luka can never win a pot. If he finishes first in a pot group, the pot pays the highest human finisher. He plays for pride and content only.
Busy week? A member can hand Luka his whole sheet — Luka makes every pick from the same transparent knowledge rule Play Luka runs on (the listed favorite, else the home team) and the same information he'd give you in a Take. No hidden edge and no secret model. You see every pick and can override any of them, or the whole sheet, any time before it locks; the sheet that locks is yours. Autopilot is off by default, chosen per week or for the season. In pot groups it's disclosed — a marker by your name in the standings — and an organizer can ban it in his group outright. His room, his call.
Showtime Lukas never touches pot money. Ever. The site never accepts it, holds it, moves it, or takes a cut of it — no percentage, no rake, no fee that grows with the pot. That line is the whole design.
If your group plays for a pot, the organizer holds it — off this site, the way office pools have always run: friends settling up in real life. A group can note "we play for $20, Jesse holds it" in its description. That note is the platform's entire involvement.
Paying the organizer is made easy, still off-platform: the organizer can post their Venmo QR code on the group page. Players scan it and pay the organizer directly in Venmo — the money moves friend-to-friend inside Venmo; we never process or confirm any of it. The QR is a convenience picture with a label that says exactly that: "Pay the organizer directly — Showtime Lukas isn't part of payments."
Who has paid is a list, not a payment system: a player taps "I paid" (and can attach their Venmo confirmation screenshot), the organizer confirms with one tap, and the group page shows the paid list for everyone to see. Among friends, that list does the enforcing — nobody wants to be the one name in red on Sunday morning.
What we do charge for is the software — the House membership, flat, for the premium room and tools. A group playing for $0 and a group playing for $500 cost the organizer the same, because we're selling the room, not a piece of anyone's game.
Pick'em is one shape of a much bigger family. The pattern that keeps a format in this house: the outcome is decided by the real world — a game, a race, a broadcast, the group's own judging — never by a game this site deals or runs. (That's the line the Card Room sits on the other side of: we deal those cards, so those tables stay play-money forever.) Every format below runs on the same rails as Pick'em, with the same money rules from the section above.
Pick one winner per week — or per round. Lose once and you're out, and you can never reuse a team. Last one standing takes it. Pro basketball and baseball run it in weekly rounds.
Settles on: real game results.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
The classic grid for one big game. Numbers are drawn when the grid locks, and each quarter's score pays per the organizer's split. The championship-game tradition, with the group page keeping score.
Settles on: the official quarter scores.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
The big March college tournament first, then the World Cup, the pro playoffs, and the tennis slams. Fill the whole bracket up front, or re-pick round by round — the organizer chooses.
Settles on: tournament results.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
A sheet of questions built for one game — written by the organizer, or drafted by Luka from real stat lines. The sheet is only as good as its settle source, and this one is the cleanest there is.
Settles on: the official box score.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
One slate per event: the winner and the podium in motorsport, the winner and top five in golf, the main card in fighting. Big-event weekends get a pool of their own.
Settles on: official event results.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
Preseason calls — the champion, the MVP, team win totals — scored as the results land. The slowest pool in the house: it opens in the preseason and pays off in the spring.
Settles on: final standings and published awards.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
One game a day. Get it right and the streak grows; miss and you're back to zero. The longest streak in the window wins — a pool for the member who shows up every day.
Settles on: daily game results.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
Luka deals bingo cards built from real broadcast and game events — the obvious catch, the cutaway, the stat that flashes on screen. First bingo in the group room wins the night; close calls go to the organizer, like every house ruling.
Settles on: what happens in the game and the broadcast; the organizer judges disputes.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
Awards-night ballots, opening-weekend box-office over/unders, reality-finale picks. The Screening Room and Encore crowds run these — bragging settled on the published numbers, not on opinions.
Settles on: published results and box-office figures.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
At the Dock: biggest fish of the weekend, proven with a photo and a scale. In the Grill Yard: a cook-off scored by group vote. There is no official box score for a brisket — so the judging rules go on the group's rules card before anyone lights a fire.
Settles on: the group's own judging — the honor system, stated plainly up front.
Private group · organizer holds any pot off-platform · paid list + organizer QR on the group page · the platform never touches the money, no cut, ever.
Pick'em, Survivor, Squares, and Brackets are the flagship family; the rest join the games calendar in turn, on the same group machinery when they land. And the wording on every one of them is the house wording: the organizer is a friend holding his friends' money, off this platform — the site offers no holding service of any kind, to anyone, ever.
Free is genuinely usable — free groups are how House members get recruited by their own friends.
If the organizer is a House member, the whole group gets the group features — free players included. The Jesse rule, explained →