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.
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). Slates cover all the major sports — pro football, pro basketball, pro baseball, pro hockey, and soccer — as their feeds land.
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.
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.
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.
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 →