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
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 coin, now a season. Nine of these ten are honest 50/50s — every ticket, nothing tilted. The tenth is Average Alex: as many wins as losses, by design, so he cannot go cold and cannot get streaked out. Under every name is that person’s ticket record for the year.
Every ticket is a 50/50 game priced at −110, which is what a point spread is designed to be. Winning half of them is not break-even: at this price it takes 52.4% just to hold serve, which is why a green record and a red number can end up under the same name. 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 bets, same stakes, same nine honest 50/50s, and Average Alex finishes with as many wins as losses again. Nothing changes hands until the end, so the number under each name is the running tally, and the record under that is the same one you were just watching. Then set the season up however your group would actually run it — those four switches are four of the decisions the app asks a commissioner, and the tallies add to zero in every combination.
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. Watch the records: on this screen a green record and a green number always agree, because half is break-even when nobody is charging you to play. On the last screen they did not. The other difference is that the person holding their money is in the group chat.
About those switches. Head-to-head gives you one opponent a week and a record; Free-for-all ranks everybody by profit and hands out medals. NFL post season carries the pool through the Super Bowl instead of stopping at week 18 — the thing fantasy football cannot do, because a roster of eliminated teams cannot play a Divisional game. Playoff bracket gives the last two weeks to the top four; turn it off and the season itself decides it. One champion comes out of every combination, and which rule crowns them is settled before week 1 and written on the pool.
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.
You have watched a coin flip cost four and a half cents, watched that price take a season off ten friends, and watched the same ten friends add up to exactly zero once nobody was in the middle. That third screen is this app. The only thing it asks of you is a Tuesday.
It is free, there is no card to enter, and there is nothing to cancel later.
Email login, about two minutes, and you are on this week’s board.
What you get
- An open book. Every ticket in the pool is visible, including yours, and the standings move as the games settle.
- One champion. You decide how the title is won before week 1 — best record, most profit, or a playoff bracket — and it is written on the pool, so nobody relitigates it in January.
- Your week. You bet whatever you want off the real NFL slate, every pick locks at kickoff, and it settles when the game does.
If your group wants money on it That part happens outside the app, the way a fantasy buy-in does: pick a treasurer, agree on an amount, settle in Venmo. The app is only the scoreboard, so nobody takes a cut on the way through. Whatever you agreed on is the ceiling, because there is no reload button and nothing to reload.
Every Tuesday the credits go back to 1,000 for everybody. That is the part a sportsbook cannot sell you: not better odds, just a season that starts over instead of a balance that only moves one way.
How a week works 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.