For the team · thought experiment
Ten of us. $1,000 each. Real juice.
Each NFL week they put $400 on a coin flip (or whatever’s left). Books keep about 10¢ on the dollar — the real blended hold, not a single −110 game. Watch one season. Then it keeps eating.
$400 a week (or the remainder). Win pays $320 on $400 — that’s a 10% hold, in line with U.S. sportsbooks once parlays are in the mix. Lose takes the $400. What leaves us sits in the house. Old $100 / −110 ticks took hundreds of weeks to bust the last person; that hid the tax.
Zoom out
That was $10,000. The country did $166 billion.
Same pipe. Same destination. Last year legal U.S. books took in about $166B in wagers and kept about $17B — roughly ten cents on every dollar that went through.
Paid back to winners ≈ 90%. The rest is the tax on watching sports. We are not extracting that from Vegas. Ten friends will not. The point is the pipe exists — and we don’t have to use it.
Source: American Gaming Association / RG.org, 2025. Handle ≈ $166B, GGR ≈ $17B, hold ≈ 10%.
Same ten people · closed loop
Unplug the house. Money stays in the chat.
We rewire into a circle — everyone connected, house stuck at $0. H2H starts even: +green / −red, the circle still nets zero. Toggle Pool to park buy-ins in the middle until 1st / 2nd get paid.
H2H starts at $0. Wins go green (+), losses go red (−). Add the circle up: still $0. House still $0. Pool: $200 buy-in each sits in the middle, then 80% / 20% to 1st / 2nd.
What we build instead
Closed loop. Us first. Everyone else if it works.
You’re on this with me. The product is a sportsbook-shaped scoreboard for our group. If we actually play — and it holds — then it can be the same ritual for anyone who doesn’t want their Sunday feeding a house.
Free to play. The app never takes a deposit. If we want money on it, we run it like fantasy: pick a treasurer, agree a buy-in, settle in Venmo. Head-to-head weekly skins, a season pot, or 1st / 2nd / 3rd. House rules stay in the chat. We take 0%.
- Same tickets, different opponent Credits on live sportsbook-style odds. Open book. Best gambler wins.
- This group is the beta NFL now. Other sports and a wider audience only if we still open it in December.
- Your job Break the idea. Then tell me if you’d play. Brief is next: mechanics and the week.