How to Maximize Your Chance to Win Super Bowl Office Pools

Many offices and workplaces are running pools for the Super Bowl. The most common pool is the square or grid. There are many ways to construct these grids, but the one used most often is shown here.

The idea is to pick the grid square to match the last digits of the score of the game. For example, if you believe the score will be Patriots 13, Giants 9, you first look at the last digits of the score. These are 3 and 9. You navigate to the 3 column, then down to the 9 row and place your name in that square.

Notice that this same square would “hit” if the score was Patriots 23, Giants 9, or even Patriots 3, Giants 19—or any other score where the Patriots’ score ended in a “3″ and the Giants’ ended in “9″.

Some people claim, as for example Ehow.com does, that playing the grid “calls for no skill or knowledge of the game” of football. This isn’t always true, because it turns out that with just a little knowledge of how points are awarded, you can maximize your chance of capturing the pool. Of course, the labels on the columns are sometimes picked after the boxes are filled in, so you can’t do anything to affect your chances (except buy more squares). But the statistics below will still help you figure your chances of winning once you do know the labels.

Certain scores in football are more likely than others because of the peculiarity of NFL rules. Not surprisingly, scores in increments of 7 are seen more often than scores in, say, increments of 4. A score of 4 is possible in football, but not very likely.

In fact, over the last 2,822 NFL games no team ended with a score of 4. No teams had a score of 1. Just one team had a score of 2, three ended with a score of 5, and just ten ended with a score of 8.

This kind of information helps us pick better squares, but it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know, because the grid is about pairs of scores, and only about the last digits of those pairs.

So we looked over the last 2,822 NFL game and found that the top 5 most likely pairings, or grid squares, were these:

1. 0 to 7 (8.4%)
2. 4 to 7 (7.1%)
3. 0 to 3 (7.1%)
4. 3 to 7 (5.0%)
5. 1 to 4 (4.6%)

The bottom 5, or least likely pairings, were these:

1. 2 to 2 (0.04%)
2. 5 to 5 (0.07%)
3. 9 to 9 (0.18%)
4. 2 to 8 (0.21%)
5. 5 to 9 (0.32%)

These are symmetric. Meaning, to maximize your chances you should grab both the “0 to 7″ and “7 to 0″ boxes. There is an 8.4% that one or the other of these will hit. Whatever you do, don’t select the “2 to 2″ box: scores ending with last digits 2 and 2 only happened once out of nearly three-thousand games.

The table above has green X’s to show the best picks and red O’s to show the worst. As we guessed, the most likely boxes are associated with scores with increments of 7 (such as 7, 14, 21, etc.) and 3 (remembering 3 + 7 = 10, or a last digit of 0). The worst boxes are for unusual scores.

Bigger grid?

If your grid is not just last digit, but every number, from 0 to 62 (the maximum score seen over the last 10 years), then the problem is just the same. In this kind of grid, you are picking the actual score.

The scores seen most often were:

1. 17 to 20 (2.3%)
2. 20 to 23 (1.9%)
3. 24 to 27 (1.8%)
4. 17 to 24 (1.6%)
5. 10 to 13 (1.5%)

The scores seen least often were more variable. The were a huge number of games scores which were only seen once: a total of 212 different scoring combinations that occured just one time. Some examples: “0 to 10″, “11 to 26″, “14 to 25″, and so on. Far too many to list.

Good luck! And come back here after the game and tell us how you fared.

Thanks to Jill Krasny at Business Insider for suggesting this topic.