Charting your Super Bowl Squares chances: LIX Edition
If you get a little lucky maybe your winnings can pay for that Bourbon Street bar tab
The Big Game is finally here. What better way to hedge against the sadness of another potential Chiefs championship than by winning some money in your Super Bowl Squares competition?
Every year I like to revisit a version of a post I do every February to walk through historical squares trends, and identify the numbers you want and the ones you’re hoping to avoid. I’ve done plenty of analyses like this over the years on this blog, so I won’t rehash all of that here; instead I’ll provide the cliff notes version so you can focus on scrolling through the charts below.
But first, a primer on how squares works: the game is played on a 10x10 grid with the digits 0-9 on both axes, forming 100 total squares. The goal is to match the last digit of each team’s score at the end of each quarter and at the end of the game. For example, if the 1st quarter ends Philadelphia Eagles 14, Kansas City Chiefs 7, the individual who bought the square intersecting Eagles-4 and Chiefs-7 will win money1.
Final Score
What squares do you really want once the confetti flies? In most versions of the game the numbers 0-9 are randomly drawn shortly before kickoff, so there’s virtually no skill involved. But if Lady Luck is on your side, you’ll want to be saddled with the darker colored squares in the below graphic.
Using data from every NFL game going back to 20152, the best end-of-game squares to have are those with zeroes, threes and sevens. The highest probability outcome on Sunday — while still very low at 3.7 percent — is the Eagles’ score ending in 7, and the Chiefs’ score ending in 0.
You can see the frequency with which different digits wind up winning out below.
Scores by Quarter
Not all quarters are created equal though. The first quarter has the least variety in scoring outputs, especially in the Super Bowl which tends to be low scoring. The best combination of all is to have 0-0 for both teams — that combo has nearly an 18 percent chance of hitting after the first quarter.
If you look at all NFL games since 19993 a final digit of zero has come up more than 6,000 times after the 1st quarter. Outside of zero, sevens and threes are common in those earlier quarters as well. Things start to even out from there as you see numbers associated with larger total scores like fours, sixes and ones as games progress.
The bottom line is if you have any hopes of winning your Super Bowl Squares pool, the best squares to own are various combinations of zeroes, threes and sevens, and in some cases, fours as well. Below you can see the cumulative chance of winning money for the most popular combos in a per-quarter payout system4. Cross your fingers for 0-0.
Check out my NFL Analytics site for more NFL scores, stats and predictions.
The most common payout is one winner for each of the first three quarters and a fourth winner for the final score. The payouts can be equal or they can increase each quarter. For example, if each square is sold for $10, then each winner would receive $250 in the equal payout scenario. Alternatively the payout structure could look like this: 1st Quarter $100; 2nd Quarter $175; 3rd Quarter $275; Final Score $450.
In 2015 the NFL moved the distance for the point after kick to the 15-yard line so I am limiting the analysis to this timeframe.
Note I used data back to 1999 for this portion of the analysis since the sample size of certain less-observed combinations otherwise gets too small on a per-quarter basis.