An open book
Everyone’s tickets are visible, everyone is ranked, and badges stack all season. Two titles at the end: Champion wins the bracket, Sharp wins the season. They are usually different people, and that argument is the off-season.
The price
Heads you win 91¢. Tails you lose a dollar.
It is an honest coin. Fifty-fifty, every single flip. The only thing that is not even is what the two sides pay — and that is exactly the price a sportsbook charges on a football game. Go ahead and flip it.
Tap the coin
tap for one
0 heads
0 tails
Flips0
You are$0.00
Expected P/L$0.00
$0
expected P/L
you
One flip is a story you tell your friends. A thousand flips is a price list.
−110 means you risk $1.10 to win $1.00. So a win pays you 91 cents, a loss costs you the whole dollar, and every flip is worth −4.5¢ to you before it even lands. That is the fee, and you pay it on the ones you win too. Scale it up and nothing changes: on a $100 bet the win pays $90.91, the loss costs $100, and the fee is $4.55.
The season
Ten friends. $1,000 each. Eighteen weeks.
Same price, real volume. One of them is Alex, and Alex is going to win exactly half of his bets — dead average luck, every week, all season long. Watch what average luck is worth.
Week0
Still theirs$10,000
House has kept$0
Wagered$0
Move the sliders, then run it.
Already bet?
This is the friendliest version of the math. Parlays and chasing are
worse.
Every ticket is a 50/50 game priced at −110, which is what a point spread is designed to be. A real sportsbook takes even less risk than this one does: it balances both sides of a game and books the fee with no exposure at all. With M tickets of the same size, the chance a book finishes a season in the red is Φ(−√M ÷ 21) — it depends on how many bets get placed, not on how big they are.
The loop
Cut the house out. Nothing else changes.
Same ten friends. Same eighteen weeks. Same bets, same stakes, and Alex wins exactly half of his again. Nothing changes hands until January, so what you are watching under each name is the running tally.
Week0
Still theirs$10,000
House has kept$0
Wagered$0
The money has nowhere to go.
This is zero-sum, so it is not a better bet — it is the same bet with the fee removed. Somebody in the group still finishes the season down, and the ten tallies always add up to exactly $0.00 because that is what “nobody took a cut” looks like in arithmetic. The difference is that the person holding their money is in the group chat.
The board
Same Sunday. Same games. No house.
This is Alex’s Tuesday — the same Alex, now in the app. A thousand credits, this week’s real NFL slate, and a two-leg parlay, which is the exact ticket a sportsbook makes its money on.
A three-leg parlay at −110 pays +596 where a fair price pays +700, so a book is holding 13% of that ticket before kickoff. Nothing here takes a cut of a leg, which is the only reason the fun bet gets to just be the fun bet. The parlay math.
The deal
Nobody here is the house. Including us.
This app has never taken a deposit, never held a dollar, and never taken a cut. Here is what that leaves you with.
That happens somewhere else
Run it like fantasy: pick a treasurer, agree on a buy-in, settle in Venmo. This app has never taken a deposit, never held a dollar, and never taken a cut. The buy-in your group agrees on is the ceiling, because there is no reload button and nothing to reload.
- Tuesday 1,000 credits drop
- Tue–Mon Bet this week’s slate
- Kickoff That game locks
- Final The ticket settles
Every Tuesday the credits reset to 1,000 for everybody. That is the part a sportsbook can never offer you: a season that starts over instead of a balance that only goes one direction.
Join the pool Replay the walkthrough How a week works Already bet? FAQ Tell me what you think
Earlier versions of this pitch
Not a sportsbook. Not a casino. Does not accept, hold, or pay out money. Sources: American Gaming Association CY 2025 Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker; state regulator bet-type filings.