Commissioner setup guide

Power Points (Margin Pool) — Commissioner Setup Guide

Every Power Points setting explained — margin-of-victory scoring, against-the-spread, missed-week penalty, mid-season start window, no team reuse, entry fee and the organizer cut, and running/finalizing.

Power Points pool commissioners · 6 min read

Power Points (a “margin pool”) is a season-long NFL game with a simple, addictive twist: each week you pick one game and one team. If that team wins, you bank its margin of victory; if it loses, you lose that margin. You can’t reuse a team all season, and the highest cumulative margin wins.

It rewards conviction over volume — one great call can swing your season, and a blowout pick can bury you. This guide covers every setting the commissioner controls.

Creating your pool

Power Points is NFL-only, so the wizard is Format → Scoring → Details → Review.

Start week: Which NFL week the pool begins — Week 1 for a full season, or later to run a mid-season pool. The schedule auto-loads for your window.
How far it runs: To the end of the regular season (Weeks start–18), or a set number of weeks from your start week.
Name, entry fee & payment: Name the pool and set the buy-in. Players pay you through the app’s payment step at join; you never route money through us.

Scoring

Margin type: Straight margin (bank the raw margin of victory, or −margin on a loss) or against the spread (adjust each margin by the point spread — rewards backing underdogs who cover).
If a player misses a week: Choose the penalty for skipping a week: take the week’s worst losing margin (keeps people from coasting) or score zero.
No team reuse: Each team can be picked once all season — a core rule that forces you to spend your best matchups wisely. Highest cumulative margin at the end wins.
Picks this week: A week normally takes one pick. You can set any individual week to take up to 5 — a double-header week for Thanksgiving or a rivalry weekend, say — on the Weeks screen, using the “Picks this week” dropdown next to that week’s deadline. It applies to that week only; the others stay at one until you change them too. Everyone must pick that many DIFFERENT teams, and the no-reuse rule still holds across the whole season, so a two-pick week spends two of your teams. If somebody skips a slot the miss penalty applies once per unfilled slot, so a missed two-pick week costs twice what a missed one-pick week does. You cannot lower the number while anyone already has a pick in a slot that would disappear — clear those picks first and the setting will let you drop it.
Hide picks until lock: Keep everyone’s weekly game + team pick private until the deadline.
Pick deadline: Each week locks at that week’s FIRST kickoff by default. There is no season-wide “pick deadline” setting on Power Points and no named kickoff slots (those belong to Pick’Em and Survivor) — the deadline is a property of each week, changed on the Weeks screen: open the week and use “Picks lock … / Change”. Times are shown and entered in the pool’s own timezone, it only moves the week you change, and a deadline you set by hand survives a schedule reload. Worth knowing before you push a deadline later: any game that kicks off before the new time is already finished, and in Power Points the margin is the score — so moving a week to Sunday afternoon lets someone bank a known Thursday result. Remove the early games from the week if you want a later deadline to be airtight.

Entry fee, pot & organizer cut

Entry fee: What each entry pays. The prize pot is entries × fee, minus your organizer cut.
Organizer cutPro: What your program keeps before payouts — a percentage of the pool, a flat total, or a flat amount per entry. Set on the Settings tab; 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.
Prizes: Configure the payout on the Payouts tab — winner-take-all or top-N by final cumulative margin, each as a flat $ or a % of the pot.

Running the pool

Opening a week: Nobody can pick a week until you open it, which also emails every entrant that the slate is ready. 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 never one 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 picked in it. Nothing is renumbered: week numbers here are the LEAGUE week, so the pool simply skips that one and the nightly schedule reload will not put it back. Each game row also has a ✕ to drop a single game; that removes any pick made on it, and the game stays in the schedule so you can load it again.
Load the NFL season: One click builds your weeks and fills the games from the live schedule for your window.
Results & auto-scoringPro: Finals sync from the live scoreboard and update each entry’s cumulative margin automatically, or enter results by hand — each entry re-scores instantly.
Finalize & pay winners: Finalizing ranks entries by cumulative margin, applies your payout rules, and computes each winner’s cut. Winners appear in Payout Assist with one-tap pay links.

FAQ

How does a margin / Power Points pool work?

Each week you pick one game and one team. If the team wins you add its margin of victory to your total; if it loses you subtract that margin. You can’t reuse a team all season, and the highest cumulative margin at the end wins.

What happens if I forget to pick a week?

That’s the “missed week” setting: by default you take the week’s worst losing margin (so skipping hurts), or the commissioner can set it to simply score zero for the week.

Can I play it against the spread?

Yes — set the margin type to “against the spread,” and each pick’s margin is adjusted by the point spread, rewarding underdog picks that cover.

How are payouts and the organizer cut handled?

The pot is entries × fee minus your organizer cut (a %, a flat total, or a flat per-entry amount). You allocate it as winner-take-all or top-N on the Payouts tab, and pay winners through Payout Assist.

Ready to run yours?

Set it up in a few minutes — every option here is right there in the wizard.

Start a Power Points pool