How Pick'em Baby works

Chat, leagues, brackets, and the dashboard all require a signed-in member account. Visiting /chat without a session sends you to login first. Legacy guest sessions are no longer supported.

There are three account tiers. Pick’em leagues are always free to create and join on every tier — subscriptions upgrade the analyst for picks and predictions, monthly Yards, and league capacity, not the competition itself.

• Standard (free) — analysts for picks and predictions: Qwen 3.7 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash. Own up to 2 leagues (up to 20 members each); join as many leagues as you like. One free playoff bracket per season after you complete a full pick’em week.
• Plus (Plus) — $9.99/month subscription. Analysts for picks and predictions: Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 3.7 Plus. Own up to 5 leagues (up to 30 members each).
• Premium (Premium) — $24.99/month subscription. Analysts for picks and predictions: Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-4.1. Unlimited owned leagues (up to 50 members each). Extra playoff brackets skip the creation fee.

Create a free account to start or join a league. See pricing details →

Yards are credits that power The Scout. Each message costs Yards based on actual token usage (which models ran and how long the answer was), not a flat per-message rate. Quick stat lookups cost far less than picks and predictions that call the tier’s analysis model or live news search.

• Signup bonus — 100 Yards when you register.
• Monthly refresh — 100 on Standard, 2,500 on Plus, 6,000 on Premium.
• Before each chat — you need at least 5 Yards on Standard, 10 on Plus, or 30 on Premium; the exact charge settles after the reply finishes.
• Yards packs — any signed-in member can buy a one-time top-up on /yards (1,000 Yards for $4.99; 3,000 Yards for $12.99; 10,000 Yards for $39.99).

On your profile you can set a favorite team. The Scout keeps a respectful tone about that team and still picks from the evidence. The assistant uses one voice and declines off-topic requests.

A league is a private competition for a group of members, tied to one NFL season. Share the invite code from the leagues page or create one through the AI assistant.

Every pick’em league is free. Prize leagues with entry fees aren't available right now. All pick'em leagues are free to create and join.

Scoring formats (pick one at creation)

• Straight-up — Pick a winner for each game; 1 point per correct pick.
• Confidence — Rank your picks that week from most to least confident. With N games on the sheet, values 1 through N are each used exactly once; your top pick is worth N points if correct.
• Survivor — Pick one team to win each week; each NFL team only once per season. See Scoring for strikes and elimination.

League duration

• Full season — Points accumulate across the regular season.
• Weekly — Standings focus on the current week for shorter contests.

Owners can delete a league they created or remove members; members can leave. Sitewide official leagues and leagues with money attached cannot be deleted from the UI.

Each league’s scoring format is fixed at creation. Points are never negative — a pick earns points or 0.

Straight-up

Every correct pick earns 1 point.

Confidence

Each open pick in a week holds a distinct value from 1 to N (N = games that week). Use the drag-to-rank panel or save picks through chat; the server assigns the lowest free value to new picks unless you set one explicitly. Re-rank any time before a game kicks off — that game’s value locks at kickoff. A correct pick earns its confidence value.

Lock of the Week

Straight-up and confidence leagues can enable Lock of the Week (on by default for new leagues). Mark one pick per week as your Lock. Correct Locks score 2× their normal points; a wrong Lock scores 0. Move your Lock until that game kicks off.

Tiebreaker

Weekly standings that tie on points are broken by how close your predicted combined score is for the week’s last game (usually Monday night). In free leagues the prediction is optional on that game only; members without a prediction rank behind those who guessed.

Badges

Earn badges for a Perfect Week, Hot Streaks (5 and 10 in a row), Upset King (3+ correct picks on teams 25% or fewer of players picked), Lock Master (5 correct Locks in a season), Weekly Winner, and Survivor (10 weeks survived in a Survivor pool). Badges show on your dashboard, profile, and league leaderboards.

Season Ladder

Correct picks, Locks, upsets, badges, and Survivor weeks across all your leagues feed one sitewide season ladder. Each NFL game counts once per member (earliest-saved pick wins if you picked it in multiple leagues). Ladder weights: +10 per correct pick, +10 extra for a correct Lock, +5 for a correct upset (≤25% picked that side), +25 / +50 for week / season badges (deduped across leagues), +5 per Survivor week survived (main pool or ghost). Hide yourself on the public list from your profile.

Prizes: Sitewide ladder prizes are not live yet — the leaderboard is for bragging rights only until official prize rules ship.

Survivor

Pick one team to win each week — each team once per season. A loss or a missed week (after that week’s last game kicks off, if you had joined) is a strike. The owner sets 1, 2, or 3 strikes allowed (default 2) and whether an NFL tie counts as a survive or a strike (default survive). Last member standing wins; co-winners if everyone falls the same week or several survive the season. Eliminated? Keep picking as a ghost — you no longer compete for the pool win but still earn badges and ladder points. Other members’ Survivor picks stay hidden until kickoff.

Tied games

In straight-up and confidence leagues, an NFL tie is a push: 0 points and the game does not count as a hit or miss. Survivor ties follow the league’s tie rule.

Finals sync on a schedule; standings refresh when you open a league, when cron runs, or when you ask the AI for standings. Unpicked games score 0 — there are no auto-picks.

The league page shows the current pick week — the earliest week with a game that has not kicked off or finished. When the last game of a week starts, the next week’s slate opens automatically.

Pick a winner for every game on the sheet (or one Survivor team per week). One pick per game per member in pick’em formats; change picks until lock.

Pick locking

Each game locks at its scheduled kickoff — not a single time for the whole week. After lock, picks are visible to other league members and cannot be changed. Confidence values and Locks freeze with their games.

Where to pick

• League detail page — weekly pick sheet, confidence ranker, Survivor panel
• AI assistant — e.g. “Pick Chiefs to beat Bills in my office league”
• Dashboard — pick history across leagues

Not available yet. Prize leagues with entry fees aren't available right now. All pick'em leagues are free to create and join. Paid playoff bracket creation (a flat fee for an extra bracket, not a pooled pot) still works — see Playoff brackets.

Fill out a full NFL playoff bracket — Wild Card through the Super Bowl. Bracket scoring is separate from weekly pick’em standings.

Round-based points

• Wild Card — 1 point per correct pick
• Divisional — 2 points
• Conference — 4 points
• Super Bowl — 8 points

Access

Complete one full week of pick’em picks in any league to unlock one free bracket per season. Additional brackets cost $25 each on Standard and Plus; Premium skips the fee. Use the bracket page or the AI assistant.

The Scout answers stats questions, compares players and teams, pulls live scores and schedules, searches NFL news, and helps you manage leagues — through natural conversation in chat.

How it works

A fixed conductor (Claude Haiku) runs on every message, calls specialized tools (database history, live schedule/scores, injuries and transactions when configured, Grok news search), and renders rich components like standings tables and pick sheets. Stats, scores, and schedules come from that data. For picks, predictions, and opinions it calls an analyst — your tier’s analysis model (Qwen 3.7 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash on Standard, Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 3.7 Plus on Plus, Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-4.1 on Premium). The full take shows in a card labeled “The Scout’s analyst take · <model>”. The Scout adds a short framing sentence and does not repeat the card. It always fetches data instead of inventing stats.

Example prompts

• “Compare Mahomes and Allen this season”
• “Who’s injured on the Eagles?”
• “Create a pick’em league called Office Pool”
• “How am I doing in my league?”
• “Should I pick the Bills or Chiefs this week?”

Open the assistant →

• PostgreSQL — Historical teams, players, games, standings, and schedules, plus your leagues, picks, and brackets
• api-sports.io — Primary source for the current season schedule, final scores, and live scores (SportsRadar as fallback when configured)
• Shared scraper bridge — Current-season player and team stats synced into the app database
• SportsRadar — Injury reports and roster transactions when an API key is set
• Grok web search — Breaking news, rumors, and X/Twitter context

If a live provider is not configured, tools return a clear error instead of guessed numbers.