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A confidence pool is a pick'em pool with a ranking twist: members pick the winner of every game each week and assign each pick a unique confidence value – in a 16-game NFL week, 16 points on the pick they are surest about, down to 1 point on their true coin-flip. A correct pick earns its assigned points; a wrong pick earns nothing. Highest total wins the week. It is the format for groups that find straight pick'em too luck-driven but do not want to deal with point spreads.
In straight pick'em, most members pick mostly favorites and standings bunch up. Confidence ranking forces a second decision that separates the field: two members can make identical picks and finish ten points apart. It rewards genuine judgment about how sure you are, which is a skill casual fans enjoy discovering they have (or do not).
A 14-game week. Dana puts 14 points on the biggest favorite, 13 on a road favorite she trusts, and works down to 1 point on a true toss-up. She goes 10–4 on picks – but her four misses are the 13, the 9, the 4, and the 2. Out of the 105 points available in a 14-game week (14+13+…+1), she loses 28, finishing with 77. Meanwhile Marcus goes just 9–5 but his misses are the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1: he keeps 90 points and wins the week with fewer correct picks. That is the whole format in one example: where you are wrong matters more than how often – and it is why members argue about their rankings all week, which is exactly what you want from an office pool.
Confidence pools support the same winner structures as pick'em: weekly winners, season standings, or a split of both. Because weekly scores swing harder than pick'em (one bad 16 is a crater), the season race stays competitive longer – a half-weekly, half-season split keeps both the grinders and the gamblers engaged. If your group collects entry fees, office pool rules vary by jurisdiction; keep any money handling inside your group, since hosting platforms like SimplySportsWare charge only a hosting fee and never touch entry fees.
Confidence is the most arithmetic-heavy weekly format: every member's sheet is a full slate of picks each with its own point value, and one transposed digit changes a weekly winner. On paper, expect an hour per week of careful grading for a mid-size group. Online, the grading simply does not exist: members rank picks with a drag or a dropdown, duplicate confidence values are impossible to submit, and standings update as games end. SimplySportsWare has run confidence rank pools since 2005, with custom scoring, pick deadlines, and reports; pools start at $19.95 including your first 10 members, with a free trial. Bowl-season and playoff variants: college bowl confidence and NFL playoff confidence.
Each week you rank your picks from most to least confident, assigning each game a unique point value from the number of games down to 1. When a pick is correct you earn that game's assigned points; wrong picks earn nothing.
Usually not. The standard confidence pool is picked straight up, because the ranking itself provides the strategy. Spread-based confidence pools exist but are much less common.
Spend your top values on genuine mismatches rather than favorite home teams, and treat the bottom third of your board as damage control: those 1-to-5 point games are where contrarian picks cost little if wrong and separate you from the pack if right.
Yes. Many confidence pools mix NFL and college games, and bowl-season confidence pools, where members rank all the bowl games at once, are a popular December variant.