Blind Draw MLB playoff pool
Blind Draw is a ChooseASquare original built specifically for the baseball postseason, and it solves the problem every playoff pool runs into: with twelve teams and one obvious favourite, everybody picks the same team and there is no game in it.
Instead of picking teams, everyone picks a numbered box in each of the four rounds — eight boxes in the Wild Card, eight in the Division Series, four in the Championship Series and two in the World Series. The boxes are chosen blind, before anyone knows who is in the bracket. When each round begins, the teams are dealt into the boxes at random and everyone finds out at once which team they own.
You score the runs your team puts up in the games they win, with a bonus per win and a multiplier that grows as the postseason goes on, so the last week matters most. Because the teams are re-dealt every round, a bad first draw is not the end of your October — and because nobody is eliminated, every entry still holds a team in the World Series.
Any number of people can share a box, which means the pool never sells out. A booster club can keep selling entries right up to the deadline without capping the fundraiser.
MLB Playoff Squares
Playoff Squares takes the grid everyone already knows and stretches it across the postseason. Each player buys a square and keeps it for the run of the contest, with fresh numbers drawn for each game so a square that was cold in the Wild Card can win in the World Series.
It is the most familiar format on this page, which makes it an easy sell to a group that has run a Super Bowl grid before. It suits fundraisers particularly well: the price per square sets the pot, the payouts come out of it by period, and whatever you keep as a house cut is yours.
Because the squares are bought once and played all month, it also has the lowest ongoing effort of anything here — after the board fills, there is nothing for the commissioner to collect or chase.
MLB playoff Pick’Em
A Pick’Em is the right pool for a group that actually follows baseball. Players pick the winners through the postseason and the most correct picks takes it, with optional confidence points so a strong opinion is worth more than a coin flip.
The postseason schedule is already loaded, so the rounds appear as the field is set and picks lock at first pitch without you doing anything. Scores are graded from the real games as they finish.
It rewards knowing something, which is exactly what you want in an office of fans and exactly what you don’t want in a mixed group where half the room has not watched an inning.
World Series Squares
For a single game — Game 7, or a World Series watch party — the classic 10×10 grid is still hard to beat. A hundred squares, a random digit down each axis for each team, and the square where the two last digits meet wins the period.
Numbers stay hidden until the grid locks and then draw at random, so nobody can pick a good number on purpose. Winners highlight themselves as the scores go in.
It is free to run, it takes about two minutes to set up, and everyone at the party already knows the rules.
