Pick’Em Pool — Commissioner Setup Guide

Creating your pool

The wizard is Sport → Format → Setup → Details → Review. Everything is editable afterward.

Sport

NFL (auto-loads the schedule and grades winners), College Football or College Basketball (curated — pick the marquee games, or import by conference, or by AP ranking), MLB (curated baseball formats — see below), or Custom (any sport/league you enter yourself).

Building every week at once

You do not have to come back and load each week. On the Weeks tab, “+ Add games” opens “Every week, the same slate”: describe one week and build the whole season from it. A rule takes whole conferences AND named teams together — “every Big 12 game, plus Missouri and Arkansas out of the SEC” — with an optional AP Top 25/10 cutoff, and it can automatically feature every game involving the teams you name. You can type it in plain English and it fills the boxes in for you to check, or pick the conferences and teams yourself. Preview shows how many games each week would gain before anything is added; building never removes a game and never touches a week that is already open for picks, so it is safe to run again. Leave “keep topping up nightly” on and late-posting kickoffs come in on their own. If your Week 1 is not league week 1, set “Your Week 1 is” and the rest follow.

Building a college week (AP Top 25)

A September Saturday has around sixty FBS games, and nobody wants to pick all of them. On each week’s “Import games” row a college pool gets a ranking filter: leave it on All games, or choose AP Top 25 only or AP Top 10 only and just the games involving a ranked team come in. It combines with the conference filter and the week picker, so “Big Ten, Top 25, Week 6” is one import. The AP and Coaches polls refresh every day on their own, and each team’s rank appears next to its name where people pick — “#4 Notre Dame at #18 Penn State”.

Format (NFL)

Pick a start week (joining mid-season is fine), then run to the end of the regular season, regular season + playoffs (through the Super Bowl), or a set number of weeks.

Format (MLB)

Weekend Series (pick who wins each Fri–Sun series), Saturday Slate (that day’s full card — any day of the week you choose), a specific date, or Commissioner’s picks (you curate the games). Sweep bonus available on series.

Scoring flavor

Straight Pick’Em, Confidence (rank your picks 1…N), or Bonus Picks (flag a few picks each week for bonus points). Pick it at create, and change it any time afterwards on Settings → Scoring. In all three, entrants pick EVERY game in the slate — the mode only changes what those picks are worth. Changing it after a week has been scored means re-scoring that week.

Setup — Standard vs Advanced

Standard applies popular defaults; Advanced drops you into the full Settings editor to configure scoring, points, tiebreakers and prizes before you share.

Pick type & scoring

Pick typePro

Straight-up winners, or against the spread (ATS) — players pick a team to cover the point spread.

If a pick pushes

On ATS, when a pick lands exactly on the spread: score it as a miss, half points, or a loss. (Points-per-push below overrides this when set.)

Confidence pointsPro

Players rank every pick by confidence (1…N, each value once). A correct pick banks its confidence value; a miss earns nothing — nailing your top pick is huge.

Bonus Picks

Entrants pick every game as normal, then star a few of those picks as “bonus picks” — each correct one earns a bonus on top of its normal point. You set how many they may star per week (3 by default) and what each is worth. It does NOT limit how many games they pick; that is “Picks per week”, and blank means all of them.

Picks per week

Cap how many games each entry picks (e.g. exactly 5 of the slate) — the core of a SuperContest-style pool. Blank/0 means pick every game.

Points per win / push

Set custom point values — e.g. SuperContest’s 2 points per win, 1 per push. (Confidence scoring uses the ranked value instead.)

Tiebreakers, entries & privacy

Tiebreaker

Total points in a tiebreaker game (closest without going over), reverse-week (whoever did better in the most recent week wins, working backward), or none (co-winners split). If you choose total points you must pick THE GAME for each week — the 🎯 button beside any game on the Weeks screen. A week cannot be opened until it has one, because a total-points tiebreak with no game to predict cannot settle anything.

Entries per personPro

One each, a set number, or unlimited.

Hide picks until lock

Keep picks private until each week’s deadline so nobody copies.

Pick deadline

Lock all picks at the first game of the week, or lock each pick at its own kickoff.

Pick remindersPro

When you finalize a week, hit “Open for picks” to email everyone the slate is ready. The Commish then auto-nudges anyone who hasn’t picked before lock — by email and push — on the lead time you set (e.g. 2 days out), so you never chase entries by hand.

Prizes & payouts

Configure the pot on the Payouts tab — mix any of these. Amounts can be a flat $ or a % of the pot.

Season standings

Pay the top finishers on the season-long leaderboard (1st, 2nd, 3rd…).

Weekly winnersPro

Pay each scored week’s top scorer on top of the season prizes.

Mini-contests (week ranges)Pro

Best record over a stretch of weeks — e.g. the SuperContest’s Weeks 1–6 / 7–12 / 13–18 sub-prizes. Each range pays its own winner.

Perfect-week potPro

A pot for going N-0 in a week. “Shares” splits it across every perfect week; “Skins” is a golf-style carryover where only a lone perfect week wins and ties roll forward. It comes out of the SAME pot as your season places — 60/30/10 for the season plus a 10% perfect-week pot is 110% and you would owe more than you collected, so the total across every percentage prize is capped at 100%.

Squares BonusPro

Tie a 10×10 grid to a feature game — each entry gets a square for bonus points, blending a squares pool into your Pick’Em.

SuperContest preset

One click on the Payouts tab sets 1st/2nd overall plus the three Weeks 1–6 / 7–12 / 13–18 mini-contests — ready to tweak.

Second Chance bracket

The other answer to “I’m out in Week 2 — why keep watching?” Where a buy-back asks for more money, Second Chance costs the player nothing.

Enable Second ChancePro

When on, any entry eliminated from the main pool is automatically entered into a separate bracket that starts over from scratch. It happens on their FIRST elimination, the moment the week is scored — there is nothing for you to run, and the player doesn’t pay again.

Share of the pot

The percentage of the prize pot paid to the Second Chance winner. It comes off the top before the main pool’s prizes are calculated, so budget it the way you would a side pot — 20% is a common setting.

Last week to join

Optional cutoff. Leave it blank and anyone eliminated at any point drops in. Set it to (say) Week 6 to stop late casualties from joining a bracket that’s nearly finished.

Entry fee, pot & organizer cut

Entry fee

What each entry pays. The prize pot is entries × fee, minus your organizer cut.

Allow “pay later”

Let players join now and confirm payment later, or require confirmation to join.

Organizer cutPro

What your program keeps before payouts — a percentage of the pool, a flat total, or a flat amount per entry (e.g. $2/entry on a $102 buy-in leaves a $100 pot). Set on Settings; the pot is always shown net of it. Available on Pro Commissioner and Organization; the full pot pays out to winners on Free.

Prize pot basis / floorPro

Let the pot scale with entries, fix a guaranteed amount, or set a minimum floor.

Schedule & scoring

Opening a week

Nobody can pick a week until you open it, which also emails everyone that the slate is ready. A week that needs a tiebreaker game cannot open until it has one. Use “Open all weeks” to open the whole season at once — everyone gets a single email, not one per week.

Let The Commish open weeks for you

On the Weeks screen under ⚙ Week settings, switch on auto-open and the next week opens itself — either a set number of hours before it locks (48 by default), or as soon as every game in the week before it is final. It only ever opens the NEXT unopened week, checked hourly, and it will not open a week whose lock has already passed. You can still open any week by hand.

Removing a week or a game

“Remove week” takes a week out of the pool — refused if anyone has already made picks in it. The weeks after it move up, so the season closes rather than leaving a hole. To trim a slate, each game row has a ✕ that drops it from the week; removing a game also removes any pick made on it, and the game stays in the schedule so you can import it back.

Load the schedule

One click builds your weeks and fills the games from the live library — NFL, college, or the full MLB season (date-range imported). Custom sports: add games per week from the console.

Import by category / date

For college, pull a whole conference (SEC, ACC…) for a date range in one step, then trim — or use “Any category” to grab every game in the range for the pool’s sport.

Curate the slate (trim)

Importing by conference or AP rank is deliberately broad, so trim afterwards: each game on the Weeks screen has a ✕ that drops it from that week. That is how you land on an exact slate size — import wide, then remove down to the 10, 15 or whatever number you want. Removing a game also removes any pick already made on it, and the game stays in the schedule so you can import it back.

Auto-scoringPro

Finals sync from the live scoreboard and grade picks (and against-the-spread results) automatically — or score any week by hand.

Finalize & pay winners

Finalizing ranks the standings (honoring your tiebreaker), computes season, weekly, mini-contest and perfect-week awards, and each winner’s cut. Winners appear in Payout Assist with one-tap pay links.

FAQ