Super Bowl Squares Explained: How to play the Squares game for Super Bowl LVIII

We are less than a week away from the Super Bowl LVIII matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers and there figures to be a lot of money bet on the big game.

While more experienced bettors will look to attack the spread, which saw San Francisco open as a 2.5-point favorite before the line quickly moved towards the Chiefs, and player props, casual bettors may look to play in Super Bowl Squares.

Popularly known as box pools, Super Bowl Squares is a fun way for everyone to have some action on the game without a ton of football knowledge. The Super Bowl Squares game seems to pop up everywhere as offices, restaurants, bars and Super Bowl parties often have their own variations on the box pool set up ahead of the big game.

How do you play Super Bowl Squares?

If you're new to the concept of Super Bowl Squares, it involves setting up a grid of 100 squares in 10 rows of 10. Each box is sold for a certain amount of money, with house pools starting as low as $5 per box while bigger pots can cost thousands to enter, and that box entitles each participant to a pair of numbers.

Once all 100 boxes are sold, the top row and the far left row (as seen in this printable version for Super Bowl LVIII) get randomly assigned a digit from 0-9. Each box corresponds to a pair of digits, which represents the last digit in the score of a team in the Super Bowl.

Prizes are usually awarded at the end of each quarter and whichever person has the matching combination of digits wins the prize for that period. In Super Bowl LVII, for example, the final score of Chiefs 38, Eagles 35 means that whoever held the box of Chiefs 8, Eagles 5 won the pot for the fourth quarter.

The most basic prize payout for Super Bowl Squares involves a payout for whoever's box hits at the end of a quarter, with the first and third quarters receiving the same amount of money, the second quarter getting more than that and the final score being the biggest prize. Pools with bigger entry fees can often find more creative ways to distribute money, including the ideas of giving out prizes for reverse numbers, smaller payouts every time the score changes, a prize for touching a winning box and more.

Each pool has its own rules so you will need to see what the payouts for your version of Super Bowl Squares are in order to see what you can win. While there are slightly better odds for people who land numbers that are common in football scores such as 7, 3, or 0, anything can happen in the big game.