Super Bowl Squares: LVIII Edition
You don't need to be in Las Vegas this weekend to score a big payday. Here's everything you need to know about the numbers and trends behind squares.
The Big Game is here and everyone’s favorite office pool game is back: Super Bowl Squares.
This year’s contest in Sin City will draw a record number of bettors — an expected 67.8 million people will place a wager on the Super Bowl, representing a 35 percent year-over-year increase from last season, according to the American Gaming Association. Another 36.5 million (32 percent) plan to casually bet as part of an office pool-type contest like Super Bowl Squares.
Since it’s that time of year let’s revisit 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.
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 Kansas City Chiefs 14, San Francisco 49ers 7, the individual who bought the square intersecting Chiefs-4 and 49ers-7 will win money. 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.
But what squares do you really want on gameday? 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 20151, the best end-of-game squares to have are those with zeroes, threes, sevens. The highest probability outcome on Sunday — while still very low — is Chiefs 7, 49ers 0 at 3.7 percent.
The expected value on a $20 per square game looks something like this:
American football is unique in that scoring plays usually result in chunks of three (field goals) and seven points (touchdowns plus extra points). Sevens and zeroes are the most desirable digits because scores ending in those numbers are by far the most common — they’ve occurred more than 800 times since 2015. No other number can boast a frequency more than 600 in that timespan.
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 an 18 percent chance of hitting after the first quarter.
According to The Athletic’s analysis, of the 114 first-quarter scores in all 57 Super Bowls, one of the teams has been scoreless after the opening frame 38.6 percent of the time. In fact, three of the last nine Super Bowl first quarters have ended in a 0-0 deadlock, so a zero would be very handy there.
In all, 0-0 has hit 24.6 percent (14 times) after the first quarter in Super Bowl history, which makes it the most common score after any quarter. If you look at all NFL games since 19992 a final digit of zero has come up nearly 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 our from there as you see numbers associated with larger total scores like fours, sixes and ones as games progress.
Meanwhile some numbers like two and five have so rarely happened in the first quarter you can’t even see them in the histograms below. No team has ever ended a first quarter with a one, two or five in a Super Bowl.
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. Below3 you can see the cumulative chance of winning money for the most popular combos in a per-quarter payout system.
If your NFL team isn’t in the Super Bowl this year the next best thing is to win your friends’ hard earned cash with not-so-hard-earned luck in Super Bowl Squares. May the odds forever be in your favor.
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.