1. How Betting Squares Work
2. How Do Gambling Squares Work
3. How Football Betting Squares Work

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A betting pool, sports lottery, sweep, or office pool if done at work, is a form of gambling, specifically a variant of parimutuel betting influenced by lotteries, where gamblers pay a fixed price into a pool (from which taxes and a house 'take' or 'vig' are removed), and then make a selection on an outcome, usually related to sport. One of the biggest selling points of Square is the ability for small businesses to accept credit card payments. A great example is a vendor at a farmer's market.In the past, shoppers had to use cash to buy organic kale and gooseberry jam at a farmer's market. With a service like Square, a farmer's market vendor can turn her smartphone into a fully functioning cash register that accepts payment.

How does gambling work? Gambling can only be “responsible” if the person playing fully understands what they are doing. Here we explain the basic principles of gambling to allow you to make an informed choice. The first part of gambling involves choosing what you want to bet or wager on. A certain horse to win a race). I suppose this is the best forum to ask this question, I got in on a whim with some football squares. It was $200 a square with 4 of us pitching in $50. I figured why not. So total prize pool is $20,000. The squares cover three games, the NFC and AFC games and the Superbowl. Payouts are $1,000 for half in NFC and AFC games and $2,000 for the final. Football Squares is one of the most popular Super Bowl party games, and a great way to make your next football party even more enjoyable! It’s also very easy to set up and play. Gather a group of players and ask each person to pay a set amount of money to enter the game.

There is a lot of information summarized at footballsquares.blogspot.com (maybe too much). You can use that site to see strategy for selecting squares and the probability for winning real big and taking two or more squares. There are also a set of tables like some of the links above that show how likely 3-0 comes up for each of the quarters. There are details as your situation involves two games and half-time scores and final scores are correlated.
It wasn't that hard for me and I went ahead a calculated your situation exactly. Using 5209 games from 1994-end of 2013 reg season, 184 have ending digits of home 3 visitors 0 winning a half, 134 winning the final score, and 62 have 3-0 winning both the half and final score. Now with two games, 85.94% of the time 3-0 wins neither. The remaining 14.06% of the time, the expected return is $244.96. Congrats, so far you are worth more than was wagered and there is still the Super Bowl to come. Hope that something other than 86% chance comes yours way.

Payout	Expectation
$0	$0
$2000	$95.39
$3000	$66.21
$1000	$65.49
$2-6K	$17.87
100%

Thanks for all the information, the expectation was almost spot on, won the half of one game for $1000 split four ways. Where did you get the numbers for the table you made? I checked that blog you posted and didn't see anything on data besides if buying multiple squares where to place them. Still need to find out what the Superbowl numbers are, hopefully they will be half way decent.

Depending on how she picked the four squares, winning four squares would happen between 0.01% and 0.06% of the time. On average, once in 3200 games.

How did you come up with that number? I would think they would be a lot more correlated. If a square wins once, I would think it is a lot more likely to win again over a random square. Obviously if you have the 0,3, or 7's your chances are a lot better.

Thanks for all the information, the expectation was almost spot on, won the half of one game for $1000 split four ways. Where did you get the numbers for the table you made? I checked that blog you posted and didn't see anything on data besides if buying multiple squares where to place them. Still need to find out what the Superbowl numbers are, hopefully they will be half way decent.

The numbers for the tables come from 5209 pro football scores from 1994-2012 (all games) + 2013 (regular season). I made a mistake that's now corrected on the previous post. 26 games (not 62) games have home-visitor ending digits 3-0 at both the half and the final score. With that mistake, your expectation was $217.32 not $244.96 ... but since you actually won $1000, I hope you are not too unhappy.
To make the table, once I had the how many of the historical 5209 games gave you a winner at the half, at the final score, or for both, I then propagated those probabilities to all possibilities as your winnings were for two playoff games treating each game independently.
The tables (Oct 2013 blog post) have the probabilities of winning in each quarter, but do not convey the correlated probilities (i.e. winning both at the half and the final score) which is needed for your expectation value. When you get your Super Bowl numbers, I can make the same sort of calculation ... it will be easier as it involves only one game.

How did you come up with that number? I would think they would be a lot more correlated. If a square wins once, I would think it is a lot more likely to win again over a random square. Obviously if you have the 0,3, or 7's your chances are a lot better.

You are absolutely correct about squares being correlated with increased chances especially with 0, 7, 3, and 4's.
To get the number, I simulated over 1 billion squares games, randomizing the digits on the rows and columns, sampling all 5209 historical football box scores. I did this for all possible ways to select between 1-5 squares. For selecting four squares, like your wife, it's rare that you will win all four squares. When you do win all four squares, usually it's like your wife's case ... one of her squares won twice and two of the other squares each one once. If she picked all the squares in a column corresponding to the underdog team, winning four squares would happen 0.064% of the time - and she probably had one of the good numbers for that column. If she happened to pick four squares all on unique rows and columns, there's less likelihood that she would get all good numbers, and only 0.0136% of the time would she be expected to win four squares. There are a total of 16 different ways you can pick four squares in a 10 x 10 grid where the rows and columns get randomized. The average of those 16 different ways gives about 1 chance out of 3200 for picking four squares and winning all four times in a squares game.

How Betting Squares Work

My blog on all of this shows that there are strategies. You can't increase or decrease your expectation value ... squares is a fair game. But you can change how likely you are to win 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 squares depending on how you pick squares. In the example above, picking all of them in a column turns out to win something 12.39% of the time (but gives you the largest chance for winning all four squares). Picking them all with unique rows and columns wins something 13.47% of the time (but gives the least chance for winning all four squares). What you can do is trade away a small probability difference for winning something for a much larger probability of winning two or more (and sometimes even all four) squares.Thanks for all the information fanofx, any chance you could figure out the probabilities and expected return of the numbers 4 home, 0 away. Thanks.

Thanks for all the information fanofx, any chance you could figure out the probabilities and expected return of the numbers 4 home, 0 away. Thanks.

Wow - Great numbers again! Expectation is $421.67 but remember that more than 88% of the time, you'll go home empty (which is why winning the 1st $1000 is so cool). My numbers are based on the 5209 historical games that I have from 1994. An analysis of the Bronco's and Seahawk's scoring tendencies suggest your expectation is about $550/$300 (not exact as correlations aren't accounted) if the home team (4) is Denver/Seattle. Denver scores a lot of TDs relative to FGs whereas Seattle scores with a more even mixture. See this link.

Payout	Expectation
$0	$0
$8000	$127.47
$3000	$96.18
$1500	$77.17
$4500	$42.33
$9500	$41.95
$12500	$16.80
$11000	$14.78
$14000	$2.69
$6000	$2.30
100%

Hope the Super Bowl is like 2012 Week 12 Bengals vs Raiders! It's happened once before with 4-0 winning all four squares.
Raiders 0 0 10 0 10
Bengals 14 10 0 10 34
I hope I added to the enjoyment of you and your buddies' squares game this year.

So squares is basically bingo? Lol

Basically... There seems to be some thing to how you pick multiple squares to slightly increase your odds, but one square... That is just blind luck.Wow - Great numbers again! Expectation is $421.67 but remember that more than 88% of the time, you'll go home empty (which is why winning the 1st $1000 is so cool). My numbers are based on the 5209 historical games that I have from 1994. An analysis of the Bronco's and Seahawk's scoring tendencies suggest your expectation is about $550/$300 (not exact as correlations aren't accounted) if the home team (4) is Denver/Seattle. Denver scores a lot of TDs relative to FGs whereas Seattle scores with a more even mixture. See this link.

Payout	Expectation
$0	$0
$8000	$127.47
$3000	$96.18
$1500	$77.17
$4500	$42.33
$9500	$41.95
$12500	$16.80
$11000	$14.78
$14000	$2.69
$6000	$2.30
100%

Hope the Super Bowl is like 2012 Week 12 Bengals vs Raiders! It's happened once before with 4-0 winning all four squares.
Raiders 0 0 10 0 10
Bengals 14 10 0 10 34
I hope I added to the enjoyment of you and your buddies' squares game this year.
Thank you for all the information and you most certainly have added quite a bit of fun to our squares for this year. Thanks for all the work you did figuring it out.

Basically... There seems to be some thing to how you pick multiple squares to slightly increase your odds, but one square... That is just blind luck.

No! If the expectation for any square is the same (say, x), then the expectation for any set of n squares is just n*x. The variance may be different depending on which squares you pick (since the squares are not independent), but your EV is the same.

How Do Gambling Squares Work

This is just like saying that no betting system can overcome a negative expectation game, or that you can't add up a sequence of negative numbers and get a positive number. Expectation is additive!!

How Football Betting Squares Work

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