Free Sports Betting Contests Pick'em Games, Props + More

Pick’em contests have their players picking the winner of head-to-head matchups during the NFL or college football season. Every winning pick earns a point.

The goal is to accumulate the most points by the end of the season or contest period, which means you have to make the most winning picks.

These contests often feature weekly, monthly, or season-long prizes. Beat the Geek is one example of a free NFL pick’em, which you can play now (and maybe even win an NFL trip for two).

Survivor pools typically run the length of a full season. Each week, players pick one team with the best chance of winning their matchup. If that team wins, the player will advance to the next round of the pool. If their team loses, the player is eliminated.

The catch is that if your team wins, you can’t select them again from the pool for the rest of the contest. Survivor pools require players to make strategic choices to ensure there are still strong teams left to pick late in the season — and there can only be one winner.

NFL survivor pools are the most common type of this pick’em contests, thanks to their once-a-week matchup schedule.

DFS is a faster-paced version of traditional fantasy sports, usually requiring you to draft a team for just a single day. This contrasts with typical fantasy leagues, where players usually draft for a whole season’s worth of competition.

DFS players earn points based on the real in-game performance of the athletes they draft. There is also a salary cap while drafting, offering layers of depth and strategy to selecting the best possible team. At the end of the contest period, the highest-scoring players’ teams win cash prizes, typically split among the top-performing teams.

Bracket contests ask their players to predict the outcome of each game in a tournament, typically from the opening round-robin games right to the final game. Players fill out their brackets before the tournament begins by selecting the team they think will win each scheduled game, earning points if they are correct.

Points for correct predictions will usually increase after each round, which means accurate, long-term predictions will score big. The contestant with the most points at the end of the tournament wins.

Brackets are popular for large-scale tournaments, such as the NCAA’s March Madness Bracket Challenge.

Prop sheets are used to predict in-game events — like the number of touchdowns a player will score or which team will win a coin toss. Participants make picks before a game starts and earn points for correct predictions. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Prop Sheets are popular for adding extra excitement to big games, especially the Super Bowl.

Squares are a contest in which players buy specific cells (squares!) in a grid, where each cell corresponds to possible last digits for each team in the Home–Away score. Players attempt to guess the correct score at the end of each quarter, half, or period. If you buy a square and the last digits match the last digits of both teams’ score, you win a prize or share of a cash pool.

A popular version of squares is Super Bowl Squares, where a player buys squares in a 10 × 10 grid labelled 0–9.