Super Bowl Squares, Explained

A brief explainer for the rules of the popular Super Bowl squares contest.

There's no shortage of ways to gamble on Super Bowl LV, which pits the Kansas City Chiefs against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You can study the game's point spreads and any number of prop bets. If you're looking for another way to engage in some Super Bowl fun, many fans turn to Super Bowl squares. 

Ahead of Super Bowl LV kickoff from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, here's how the game works.

Format:

The setup for Super Bowl squares is relatively simple. A pool consists of 10 vertical columns and 10 horizontal rows, both numbered from zero to nine. One Super Bowl team—in this year's case either the Chiefs or the Buccaneers—gets the columns and the other gets the rows. 

Each of the 100 squares inside are then purchased individually with each square priced equally. 

In most pools, the members of your respective Super Bowl party can then buy as many squares as they'd like in each quarter. The more squares that are bought, the greater the payout for the winner.

Once every box of the pool has been sold, the numbers assigned to each row and column are selected at random.

How to win:

At the end of every quarter, the person whose square corresponds with the intersection of the second digit of each team’s score wins a prize (for example, a 14–7 score at the end of the first quarter pays out the owner of the square at row 4, column 7). If a square is unowned, many people usually roll over the money to the next quarter.

The final score usually pays out the highest sum.

Super Bowl squares are often a fun game to play amongst peers. But as The MMQB's Conor Orr reported last year, it also was the centerpiece of one of the strangest kidnapping cases Western New York had ever see.