What are Super Bowl squares, and how do they work? Those office party and school fundraiser squares, explained

Every year the Super Bowl comes and goes and every year colleagues, friends, or family ask if you’d like to participate in that year’s Super Bowl squares. To those unfamiliar with gambling (and football), the concept of squares-plus-football-plus-gambling can feel as foreign as a new language. 

While Super Bowl squares are — at the end of the day — a form of gambling, its rules are much simpler than your average game of poker. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll no longer look like a deer in headlights when your coworker, friend, or relative asks if you’d like to “buy a square.”

Wait, back up – what exactly are Super Bowl squares?

Super Bowl squares is a gambling game that relies on the score of the Super Bowl to determine who wins and who loses. While there are a few iterations of the game, some offering more complex rules than others, most players fall back on the basic version of the gambling game as it tends to be the one most commonly used in, say, office parties, with friends, or among family members at your average Sunday Super Bowl party. 

The game is nothing formal – just a sheet of paper with 10 vertical lines and 10 horizontal lines and the names of the two competing NFL teams written along the top and the side. A visual example can be seen above. 

The game requires no talent and no prior knowledge of football. It’s dependent on luck and luck alone. Think of it as the football equivalent of the game show Deal or No Deal: you make a guess and hope for the best. 

That’s not to say you can’t score big if you win. Typically, when you “buy a square” you can do so for $1, $5, $10, or however much is determined by the group you’re playing with. The cost of each square affects the total payout. That can be anywhere from $100, $500, or $1000, or anything in between or beyond. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

How do you play Super Bowl Squares?

First and foremost, you have to buy a square. What does that mean? It means you pick a spot on the board where you’d like to place your name. The square in question – or squares if you buy more than one – will correspond to a vertical and a horizontal number along the top and side of the play sheet. Those numbers are typically picked out of a hat and written out in random, not numerical order. 

Those numbers are representative of the football game’s score. After each quarter, the square that corresponds to the current score – Chiefs 9, Eagles 0 for instance – is paid out to the person whose name currently resides in that box. 

If it cost $5 to buy a square then the first-quarter winner would receive $50, the second-quarter winner (or halftime winner) would receive $100, and the third-quarter winner would receive $50. The person whose name is in the box that corresponds to the game’s final score wins the jackpot. In this instance ($5/square), that’d be $300. 

There you have it. Super Bowl squares aren’t that scary after all, are they? Now it’s time to collect your quarters, rummage through your wallet, and get your play team in order. Super Bowl LVII airs this Sunday at 4:30 MST on Fox.