Football Squares Rules and Options. We always used a piece of poster-board to create the squares. The game was set up with a 10X10 grid, which results in 100 individual squares. Across the top, you took one team. You also had a team assigned to the team on the left.
How Do Football Pools Work? - How Do I Start a Football Pool?
by Max Powers - 01/20/2009
The Football Association's Management Team, working together with The FA Board, Council and staff, aims to deliver an effective and professional organisation for the greater good of English football. The FA consists of a permanent staff, predominantly based at its headquarters at Wembley Stadium and St. George's Park in Burton. The basic rules and the grid, which we explain in detail below, involves picking the score of each quarter and the final score. For example, if you have box 7 for the Broncos and box 6 for the. Furthur explanation of the payouts and how the squares work. Superbowl squares!!
There is a reason that the Super Bowl is the most watched television event each year. It is a day of celebration and family and friends gather around the TV Sunday night regardless of who is playing in the big game. Many people often wonder what draws so many non-football fans to the Super Bowl. Is it the singing, commercials, or star-studded halftime show? Those are all valid reasons but the main reason is still gambling, the hidden secret of the NFL's popularity. Numerous pools, prop bets, straight bets, totals bets, and office square pools make the game much more interesting and allow you to have a stake in the outcome. With all the pools available, one might wonder, 'How do Football Pools Work?' or 'How do I start a football pool?' Do not worry, as the following paragraphs give you this information and will allow you to be the talk of your town or Super Bowl party.
The most common football pool is the standard 100 square office pool sheet. To start one of these pools, your best bet is to download one of Doc's 100 Square Sheets (click the above link) and then take it around to all of your friends, family, and acquaintances and try and fill up the 100 squares on the sheet. This can be very time consuming and hard to accomplish depending on the amount you charge per square. If the amount is below $10, often times people will buy more then one square and thus increase their chances of winning. Regardless of the amount each square should sell for the same amount and any square has the same chance of getting any number (0-9). The payouts should be determined before your customers sign-up and most 100 square pools pay both ways each quarter with bigger amounts for the halftime score and the largest cash reward for the final square. This is at the discretion of the person running the pool, as some just pay one way or just on the final, thus creating bigger prizes but less winners. Most people pay the final and not the end of the fourth quarter in case the game would go overtime, so be sure to explain that to those in the field.
Once all the 100 squares are sold on the pool sheet, the numbers need to be drawn. This is usually done with a deck of cards (ace -10) facing upside down. After shuffling them, a person draws them one at a time until all of them are used and repeats the process on the adjacent side of the sheet. It is wise to have witnesses during the drawing to ensure that no foul play is involved and everyone has an equal chance to get any number. Once the numbers are drawn, all the customers can view their numbers and sit back and enjoy the game with an added incentive. Often times the person running the pool will take a cut from the total purse (no more then 10 percent) to cover his expenses.
How To Do A Football Board
Since most football scoring occurs in three or seven, those are the best numbers to have and will give you the greatest chance for success. The numbers 2, 5, or 9 are ones to avoid and give you the least probable chance of winning and, thus, you will likely need something unordinary like a safety or missed extra point to happen for you to collect with those numbers. Many pools refund the money to the customers that get 2-2, 5-5, or 9-9 because they have very little chance of winning. Once the score is final, the winning customers can be paid and everyone moves onto the next pool hoping for another big pay day.
This is the most popular type of football pool, but as you know there are many different kinds and many of these involve more skill then luck. A popular type of football pool that has developed over the last couple of years is called a Survivor Pool. In a Survivor Pool contest, also known as an Eliminator Pool or a Suicide Pool, customers pay a flat fee up front and pick either a winner or a loser each week. This usually does not include the point spread and if your team wins/loses you advance to the next week but cannot pick that team again. If you lose you are eliminated and will not be able select in the following week. This is a winner-take-all type of football pool with sole survivor taking the entire pot. This is determined by the person who advances the farthest into the season when everyone else has been eliminated. Be sure to check Doc's Sports homepage for weekly article giving you an edge in the survivor pools.
The final pool that we will discuss is another weekly football pool often called, 'Pick the Pros.' In this type of NFL office pool contestants pick a certain number of games each week, either straight-up or against the spread and their wins and losses are tallied each week with prizes awarded at the end of the season for the highest amount of wins. These types of pools are usually found in sports bars and often times the bar will cover all the prize fees since they expect to increase their business with customers stopping at the establishment each week to fill-out their sheets.
Football is king in America and gambling is a major reason why. Millions of football pools are found all over the country and give consumers an extra incentive to watch the game even if their favorite team is not playing. Doc's Sports is your place for all your football office pool needs and be sure to check back for daily articles.
Electric Football is a tabletopAmerican football game played on a metal vibrating field.
History[edit]
Electric Football's ancestry can be traced back to 1929, when Elmer Sas incorporated Tudor Metal Products in New York City. The company survived the Depression and in the late 1940s, Elmer's son Norman became president of Tudor and invented the game, Electric Football.
Norman Sas based the game on a vibrating car race game that Tudor already made. The early #500 Electric Football models were crude to the modern eye, but were the first tabletop football game which featured actual moving players as they reacted to the vibrations created by the electro-magnet motor under the metal field. Actual passing and kicking was also a unique feature of this first of its kind design.
How A Football Board Works
Electric Football was an immediate hit and became one of the hottest items at Christmas time through the 1960s and 1970s and to date has sold 70 million games. Tudor did so well with the game that other companies also entered the fray; Coleco, Munro and Gotham. Over the coming years, some of Electric Football's greatest innovations would come out of the competition between the companies.
Tudor produced the first all-plastic 3D players and in the 1960s an industrial designer named Lee Payne was showing Norman Sas a new set of player prototypes whose additional realism would change Electric Football forever. Tudor introduced these players on its first large game, the #600 model. Besides figures in five different realistic poses, Payne sold them on the idea of painting the figures using actual NFL uniform colors. He was instrumental in working with the creative services department of the NFL to obtain the NFL license for marketing the NFL uniformed teams.
By now Payne was working directly for Tudor Games as head of Product Development. He began taking the game boards to new heights with more realistic fields and lithographed, crowd scene backgrounds complete with scoreboards. Payne used a softer plastic material to develop the Triple Threat Quarterback (TTQB) that can run, pass, and kick. In 1967 Tudor introduced its new flagship Model 620, complete with an improved metal playing surface, cardboard backdrop scoreboard, NFL-style goal posts and NFL painted teams. This quickly set the standard for Electric Football, making the game even more popular, allowing Tudor Games to be the number one choice when selecting an Electric football game. Later, to make these realistic figures more enjoyable Tudor Games went on to create the “TTC” or Total Team Control base with its directional dial allowing finer route control and all new capabilities. In 1990 Tudor Games was sold to Miggle Toys and under the direction of Mike Landsman, the game was nurtured, preserved, and made popular again creating another generation of game hobbyists and enthusiasts.
In February, 2012, Landsman handed off operations to new owner, Doug Strohm who renamed the company, Tudor Games. Strohm re-established the NFL license, created new innovations, figures and fields and added products from many of the hobbyist inventors across the country, making Tudor Games a one stop shop for the game. Tudor Games with the help of dedicated Electric Football enthusiasts and an Electric Football non-profit fan association called the Miniature Football Coaches Association, has re-energized the game for new generations of sports fans, game players, hobbyists, and collectors.
The Electric Football hobby today features many local, regional, national and even international leagues and tournaments with hundreds of coaches participating and caps off with a World Championship tournament and convention.
The game[edit]
The game is played on a metal field, which can range in size between 24 inches long by 13 inches wide up to full scale size of 61 inches long by 27.5 inches wide. Detailed, plastic players on bases, which react to the vibration of the field, are placed on the field in formations, just as in real football. When the formations are completed by the offensive coach and the defensive coach, audibles in the form of pivots or motions are made in order to try to gain an advantage. A switch is activated that turns on an electric or battery powered counterbalanced motor which causes the field to vibrate and the players to move around the field.
As mentioned, each player is attached to a base, with 'prongs' or 'brushes', also known as 'cleats', on the underneath of the base. These prongs can be 'coached' prior to the playing of the game by using smooth mouthed pliers which stretch, shape and or flatten the prongs to get them to perform faster, stronger and in an exact route. The base in combination with a specific action figure can then be put in an on field position in the offense or defense that best makes use of the combined attributes.
Special players are used to pass, kick or punt the ball. The ball is a small slit oval piece of felt, rubberized foam or leather. The throwing Quarterback has an extended arm which the ball is placed on. The arm or the entire man can be bent backwards in order to flick the football off the arm to the intended receiver. If the ball touches the receiver figure or its base, it is considered a complete catch. Use of the throwing Quarterback is a difficult skill to master and requires practice to develop. Special players are also used for kicking and punting and have spring legs which when pulled back and released, kick or punt the ball. The original iconic quarterback that comes with the game is capable of passing and kicking and is known as the Triple Threat QB or TTQ.
In 2016, an app called Electric Football Challenge was created. The app serves as a digital scoreboard with configurable timers matching the flow of real football. The app can be enabled to do the passing and kicking in place of the traditional Triple Threat QB/Kicker. It also has a playbook containing over 45 plays and a rules section for the game.
In popular culture[edit]
- Steamroller Studios and Chillingo released their version of the classic game for the iPhone and iPod Touch in September 2009, called 'Super Shock Football'. In January 2010 they also released an 'HD' version for the iPad.
- In the film Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the two main characters, in a parody of The Seventh Seal, challenge Death to a series of games in order to escape Hell. One of the games Death loses is electric football.
- In an episode of the animated comedy series The Critic, a clip from a Ken Burns documentary about electric football shows an elderly man saying that 'electric football is a metaphor for America: always shaking, always noisy, never really knowing where it's going' before suddenly changing his mind, saying, 'Wait a minute. America's nothing like electric football. It's just a stupid game that doesn't even work!' and yelling at the cameraman to get out.
- In The Simpsons episode 'Bart Star', while coaching his son's peewee football team, Homer Simpson uses an electric football table, even instructing one player to 'spin around in a circle'. This may be the same set that Homer received for Christmas as a boy, as mentioned in Marge Be Not Proud.
- In Bill Bryson's 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir,' the author describes electric football as 'The worst toy of the decade [the 1950s], possibly the worst toy ever built'.[1]
- In the Pinky and the Brain episode 'Brain's Song' (a pun on the film Brian's Song), he broadcasts a tearjerker sports movie to the entire world, using an electric football game as his field, and broadcasts the movie to the entire world to make them emotionally weak and allow him to take over the world. Unfortunately, the vibrations of the game cause him to randomly vibrate when he attempts to take over the world, making him a laughingstock and foiling his plan.
- In the Fringe (TV series) episode 'Safe', Walter demonstrates how a substance can be rearranged to allow a solid figure to pass through it by placing a canister of rice and an action figure on a vibrating football game.
References[edit]
Sources[edit]
- Miniature Football Coaches Association The MFCA is a 501c7 association with the following mission. “The MFCA mission is to assist the electric football hobbyist by providing an online meeting place for the direct purpose of discussing, promoting and educating the user about the game and hobby of electric football and provide an annual convention which promotes all levels of electric football play and interest. Our motto is: Integrity, Fellowship and Sportsmanship.”
- Miniature Football Coaches Association Forum A forum dedicated to the discussion of all aspects of miniature electric football. This site is made possible by The Miniature Football Coaches Association.
External links[edit]
How Do Football Boards Work