Twenty-eight million. That is roughly how many Americans, going into the 2023 Super Bowl, planned to bet casually with friends in a pool or a squares contest rather than at a sportsbook.
Most of the betting around the Super Bowl is not what you would picture. It is not a room of serious gamblers studying the odds. It is a party game, often for a dollar or two, and plenty of the people playing it could not name a single player on the field. If you are watching from outside the US, the whole thing looks a little strange, and from the UK it is a smaller, later affair anyway, which I have covered in how to watch the Super Bowl.
What the grid on the fridge actually is
The party’s engine is Super Bowl squares. It is a ten-by-ten grid, so a hundred squares, and people write their name in as many as they fancy, usually for a small buy-in.
Only once the grid is full does anyone get a number. Each row and each column is randomly assigned a digit from 0 to 9. You win if the last digit of each team’s score lands on your square at the end of a quarter.
There is no skill in it and no football knowledge required, which is the entire point. A grandmother who has never seen a game has exactly the same chance as the friend who watches every week.
The bets that have nothing to do with football
The other party staple is the prop bet, short for proposition bet, a wager on something other than who wins.
The famous ones have nothing to do with the sport. People bet on the coin toss, on how long the national anthem lasts, on the colour of the Gatorade (the sports drink) tipped over the winning coach, and on which song opens the halftime show.
That is the cultural trick. A prop turns a moment nobody cares about into a reason to shout at the television, so a casual watcher has something riding on the night from the first whistle.
Why this became the main event
Since the US began legalising sports betting in 2018, the betting has moved from the edges of the broadcast to the middle of it. I spent years doing SEO in sports betting, so I watched that shift from the inside: the pools and the novelty props exist to hand a casual viewer a stake in a game they have no team in.
The scale now is genuinely large. Americans were expected to wager a record $1.76 billion legally on the 2026 game, and that figure counts only regulated bets, not the dollar-a-square pools running in a hundred thousand kitchens.
A note on the betting itself
Squares and a friendly pool are a party game. Actual sportsbook betting is a different thing: legal and regulated across much of the US since 2018, and long-established but differently regulated in the UK.
Wherever you are, it is meant to be entertainment, not a way to make money, and over time the odds are built to favour the house, not you. I don’t run betting links on these pages. If that ever changes, they will be clearly marked as paid, because I would rather you trusted the guide than the ad.
So if you get invited to one
The grid on the fridge is not a test you can fail. It is a raffle.
Put your name in a square, pick a prop that makes you laugh, and you will have a stake in the game before kickoff, sat right next to the people who have watched football their whole lives. For one night, that is the great leveller, and it is a surprisingly good way in. If you want to know what you are actually watching once the game starts, the Super Bowl explained is the place to begin.
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