The squares board goes up in our break room on Monday mornings in football season, taped to the side of the fridge just above the sign about labeling your lunch, and most weeks it's full by about eleven. It's ten bucks a box and a hundred boxes. Dave from payroll runs it. He has since before I started at the claims office here in Columbus, and he does number draw himself at lunch with ten slips of paper in an old Folgers can that lives in his bottom drawer for that one purpose and, as far as anybody can tell, no other.
Two Mondays ago Callum drew a 2 across the top and a 5 down the side. Callum transferred over from our Leeds office in January of last year, so this is his second season of American football, and he has opinions on it that nobody asked him for. He looked at his box for a good while, then turned around to the four of us waiting on the microwave and said, "This is roulette, isn't it. It's roulette with a hundred pockets and nobody's told you half of them are dead." Nobody laughed, which he took personally.
He wasn't wrong, exactly. I've been chewing on it on and off ever since, mostly because he won't let it go.
One hundred boxes and no football required
If you run pools you already know how squares works, but for anybody who's only ever done pick'em, here's the short version. You draw a ten by ten grid with one team across the top and the other down the side, and people buy boxes before anybody knows what numbers they're getting. Once the board is full, the digits 0 through 9 get drawn at random for the top row and again for the side. So every box ends up as a pair, and at the end of each quarter whoever's pair matches the last digit of each team's score gets paid. Our board pays $150 for the first quarter, $250 at the half, $150 after the third and $450 on the final, which comes to the whole thousand, and Dave keeps nothing for his trouble. He says the can is payment enough.
What I like about squares, and I think it's why it's the one pool that gets the whole floor in on it, is that knowing football is worth exactly zero. Marisol from HR, who once asked me if the Browns were "the orange ones or the other orange ones," has won it twice this season already. She has never sat through a full game. Meanwhile I've been in the office pick'em for nine years, I read the Wednesday injury reports like they're part of my actual job, and I have never taken a single dollar off that fridge. My wife thinks this is hilarious.
Not every box is born equal
Here's what Callum was getting at though. The digits are drawn at random, sure, but the scores they get matched against are not random at all, football points come in lumps of 7 and 3 with the odd 2 or 6 thrown in, so some last digits show up way more than others and some hardly show up at all.
Zero and 7 are the big ones. Three and 4 are pretty good too, the 4 mostly thanks to all the 14s and 24s. Way down at the bottom sit the 2 and the 5, which squares people talk about the way my uncle used to talk about a lake with no fish in it. Back in 2018 a data scientist named David Robinson went through more than 9,000 NFL games going back to 1978, and his advice in plain English was that you really do not want to be holding a 2 or a 5. Even his best pairs, 7-0 and 4-7 and their flips, only came in around 3% of the time on the final, which tells you how much luck there is even right at the top of the board.
A few years later Stephan Teodosescu crunched it again and put the winner ending in 7 and the loser ending in 0 at 3.3% of games since 2016, the most common final there is. He also found that 18.3% of first quarters since 1999 had ended 0-0, which is the box everybody secretly wants on a slow Monday night. On a perfectly fair board every box would be 1% exactly. So the top box is worth more than three ordinary ones while costing the same ten dollars, and the dead ones are worth a lot less, which honestly feels a bit rude when you're the one holding it.
The rule book has shifted things a little as well. Since 2015 the NFL has lined the extra point up at the 15-yard line instead of the 2, so more kicks get missed and a few more coaches go for two. Two-point tries went from about five percent of attempts to about eight after the change. A couple of missed kicks turns a 14 into a 12, a two-point try turns a 14 into a 15, and all of a sudden the 2s and 5s are in it. Not a lot, but a little.
The night Callum's dead box came good
Callum's first ever square board was the one for Super Bowl LIX, about three weeks after he landed in Ohio. That was the Eagles and the Chiefs in New Orleans on February 9, 2025, and Dave had the Eagles across the top and the Chiefs down the side. Callum bought one box because he felt like he should have, got drawn a 0 for the Eagles and a 2 for the Chiefs, and asked me what that meant. I told him, with a lot of confidence, that it meant he had just given Dave ten dollars.
Then they played the game. Philadelphia was up 7-0 after the first quarter, so the 7-0 box got paid, the textbook result. It was 24-0 at the half and 34-6 after three. Kansas City scored a couple touchdowns late on that didn't matter to a single living person in that building, except it turned out they mattered to Callum, because the final was 40-22 and the 0-2 box took the biggest payout of the night. Dave paid him in twenties.
He has brought it up about once a week since. Any time somebody calls the 2 a dead digit he just quietly says "Super Bowl fifty-nine" into his coffee and walks off.
Who draws the numbers
Squares only works if the draw is clean, and in most offices the draw is the one bit nobody ever checks. Dave's can is honest as far as I can tell, but last season somebody in underwriting floated the idea that Dave "always seems to do ok" and it got kind of wierd around the fridge for a week. He said it as a joke, or at least that's what he told Dave afterwards out in the parking lot, with Dave standing there holding his lunch bag and his car keys and not saying very much, which if you know Dave is about as angry as he gets. In fairness Dave has won three times in six years on a board where he buys a few boxes most weeks. That's about what you'd expect. But you can't really prove the slips weren't stacked when nobody can see inside the can.
My fix, which I sent Dave in an email he never answered, is to use the NIST Randomness Beacon. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has run a public beacon since a first prototype in 2013, and about once a minute it puts out a fresh 512-bit random value, mixed from at least two separate random number generators and stamped with the time, so anybody can go back later and check what it said. It's built for the exact situation where a bunch of people have to trust a random pick that nobody could have fiddled with. Their page even warns you not to use the values as secret encryption keys, which is fine, we're using them for a piece of paper on a fridge.
How it'd work is pretty simple. Before the board fills, everybody agrees on one pulse, say the 12:15 on Monday. When it comes out you read the value left to right, skip the letters, skip any digit you've already used, and the first ten digits you get become the numbers across the top in that order. Then you keep going for the side. If you run out you just use the next minute's pulse. Nobody can know the numbers before 12:15 and nobody can change them after, and if Marisol wants to check Dave's work she can pull up that same pulse on her phone. I will admit it's less fun than watching Dave shake a coffee can.
What a roulette wheel does that our board doesn't
So I went and actually looked into Callum's roulette line, and I believe it holds up better than I wanted it to, only it's backwards in one way that took me a minute to see.
A roulette wheel in Britain has 37 pockets, the numbers 1 to 36 plus one green zero, while the wheels you mostly see in American casinos have 38 because they add a double zero. Every pocket on a wheel is the same size and comes up just as often as any other, that's the whole point of a wheel, and the house takes its cut by paying you a bit under the true odds. A bet on a single number pays 35 to 1. On a single-zero wheel the true odds are 36 to 1, which works out to the house keeping about 2.70 cents of every dollar over time, and on the double-zero wheel the true odds are 37 to 1 and the house keeps about 5.26 cents, very nearly twice as much.
Our board runs the other way around. Dave pays out every cent, so there's no house cut at all, nobody skimming anything. The unfair part is the pockets themselves. Picture a wheel with a hundred pockets where the 7-0 pocket is three times the normal size and the 2-5 pocket is a sliver you'd need your reading glasses for, and you don't get to pick which one is yours. So the dead pockets line is about right, it just took me the whole drive home to work out that it's our board that has the lopsided pockets and his wheel back home that's even.
Callum's wheel back home
Callum plays a bit of roulette back in Leeds, on his phone mostly, and he takes the single zero for granted the way we take free refills for granted. One lunch he pulled up the UK roulette lobby at Swift Casino to show me, and there they all were, European and French wheels with the one zero, an American one with two, and live dealer tables on top. He tapped the American wheel and asked who on earth picks the one with the extra pocket when the other one is sitting right next to it. I couldn't have signed up even if I'd wanted to, the site is for players in Britain, so this was me looking in through the window. He also told me the roulette machines in the bookies back home used to take up to £100 a spin until the limit got cut to £2 in April 2019, which I definitely did not know and which he seemed oddly proud of.
In fairness to the 2 and the 5
I do want to stick up for the dead digits a little, because the math makes them sound more hopeless than they feel on an actual Monday.
For a start, you don't pick your numbers on a squares board. They get drawn after you've paid, so all the stuff about 7s and 0s is just things you find out about afterward. The only real decision is whether your ten bucks goes in the can, and once the draw is done the board is what it is. There's a kind of little trading market that pops up for an hour on Monday afternoons, people trying to buy a 7-0 box off whoever got it, and last year Callum offered Dave twenty dollars cash for his. Dave laughed at him. Given the numbers I think that was fair, though Callum still brings that up too.
The bigger thing is how few games there are. A roulette wheel gets spun hundreds of times a night and that 2.70 cents grinds away at you, spin after spin, until its the only thing that counts. Our board runs maybe twenty times a season. With that few games the gap between a good box and a bad one mostly never gets a chance to show itself, any one Monday is pure noise, and that's exactly how a 0-2 box wins a Super Bowl and how Marisol beats me at a game I have been studying for nine years. If there was an edge you could actually work in squares, the people who know football would start winning it, the people who don't would quit, and pretty soon it'd be me and three guys from IT arguing about pick'em again.
Some offices get around the dead box problem by drawing fresh numbers every quarter, so nobody is stuck with a 2-5 for the whole night. I've suggested that one too. Dave says it means four times the slips and he only has the one can.
Last Monday
Last Monday Callum drew a 7 and a 0, of course he did. He'd bought one box and got the best pair on the board. Then both teams finished in the 20s with a 3 and a 6 on the end, and the final went to someone I have honestly never spoken to. Callum took a picture of the board before Dave took it down and said he was keeping it for evidence, though he wouldn't say what. The board goes back up Monday and I'll put my ten in like always. Callum has already asked Dave if he can have the box closest to the fridge handle, which is apparently lucky now.
