March Madness Games Online: Bracket Pools and Squares Boards
Two ways to play the NCAA Tournament with friends and family. Create a bracket pool or a March Madness squares board in seconds. Share a link, track picks and winners, and keep the tournament fun for any group.
The bracket will be revealed on March 14, 2027.
Bracket Pools
The classic game: everyone fills out a bracket before the tournament. Live leaderboard updates as games finish. Custom round scoring and tiebreakers.
Learn MoreSquares Boards
A 10x10 grid where one square wins per tournament game. Pick a start round; winners determined by score digits as games complete.
Learn MoreGlobal Leaderboard
See how bracket players rank across all pools on PickMySquare.com. Opt in from your bracket to compete site-wide.
View LeaderboardBracket Pool or Squares Board: Which One Should You Run?
Both games run on the same NCAA Tournament, and both are free on Pick My Square, but they reward completely different things. A bracket pool rewards knowing basketball: you predict every winner before the first tip, then watch your picks live or die for three weeks. A squares board rewards nothing but luck: you claim a couple of squares on a 10x10 grid, and the last digits of a final score decide whether you win. Neither game is "better." They fit different groups and different levels of attention.
Run a bracket pool when your group actually watches basketball, or wants an excuse to. Maybe it's coworkers who argue about seeding every February, or a friend group with a running rivalry over who "gets" March more than everyone else. The pool rewards paying attention across the whole tournament, not just the games your group happens to watch together.
Run a squares board when the game itself is the point, not the bracket: a watch party for the championship, or any single upset-alert game your group wants an excuse to gather around and watch start to finish. Nobody has to know anything about basketball to win. Grab a couple of digits and see if the score breaks your way.
Plenty of groups just run both. Open a bracket pool on Selection Sunday for the full three-week arc, then spin up a squares board for whichever single game gets the most attention, usually the championship. Setting up both takes a few minutes combined. For a deeper side-by-side, including group size and time commitment, read our full comparison of squares vs bracket pools.
How the Tournament Is Structured
The NCAA Tournament opens with the Opening Round, a short play-in round that trims the last few teams down to a clean field of 64. From there it's single elimination, no exceptions: Round of 64, Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four, and the championship game. Lose once and you're out, which is exactly why the format produces an upset nobody saw coming pretty much every year.
That's 63 games from the Round of 64 through the title game. The whole thing runs from mid-March to early April, so figure about three weeks from the opening tip to a champion cutting down the nets. Selection Sunday, the day the full bracket is announced, is also the natural time to lock your bracket pool picks and decide which round your squares board should start.
You don't have to run either game for the full field. Both a bracket pool and a squares board on Pick My Square let you choose your start round: the play-in games, the Round of 64, or straight to the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight if your group would rather skip the early rounds and start once the bracket's already been cut in half.
How Our March Madness Squares Board Scores Every Game
March Madness squares, also called NCAA Tournament squares (we call it MMM internally, short for March Madness Madness), works like football or basketball squares, with one twist: instead of team names on the axes, the two axes are labeled Winners and Losers. A single squares board follows the whole tournament, and the two teams change every game, so the axes can't be team names the way a single-game board's can.
The owner draws the numbers once the board is full: 0 through 9 land on each axis live, and the board locks right there. Nothing about the draw is automatic, and it can't be re-run once it happens. When a tournament game goes final, we take the last digit of the winning team's score for the Winners axis and the last digit of the losing team's score for the Losers axis. Whichever square sits at that intersection wins that game. A 78-72 final, for example, hands the win to whoever holds Winners 8, Losers 2. It doesn't matter which team was home or away, or which team you'd have picked in a bracket. Just the two final digits.
Winners lock in when a game goes final, not at halftime or the end of a half, so the board stays quiet during a game and updates the second it ends. The board's Winners Timeline lists every finished game and which square won it, so nobody has to track it by hand.
When you create the board, you choose a start round, anywhere from the play-in games through the Final Four, and whether play-in games count at all. One square wins per tournament game from that round through the championship, so starting at the Round of 64 produces 63 winners over three weeks, while starting at the Sweet 16 gives you 15 (8 plus 4 plus 2 plus 1). Starting later is popular for groups that want a shorter commitment or are setting a board up after the tournament has already begun. Our full guide to how March Madness squares work walks through setup with real score examples, or go straight to the squares board page to create one.
How Bracket Pool Scoring Works
A bracket pool asks everyone to predict the entire tournament before it starts: every winner, every round, all the way to the champion. Points build up as your picks hold. The default system doubles the point value each round: 1 point for a correct Round of 64 pick, 2 for Round of 32, 4 for Sweet 16, 8 for Elite Eight, 16 for Final Four, 32 for correctly picking the champion. A title pick that survives is worth as much as 32 first-round picks combined. Pool owners can adjust the scoring if the default doesn't fit their group.
The leaderboard updates live as games finish, and it shows each entry's max possible score: the most points that bracket could still finish with if every remaining pick comes true. That's the number that tells a pool honestly whether they're still alive or just rooting out of habit. Ties are broken by a tiebreaker pick, the combined final score of the championship game, predicted before the tournament starts.
Setup takes about the same five minutes as a squares board. Pick a start round, decide whether play-in games count, choose how many entries each person can fill out, and share one link. Players enter a name and, if they want, an email; no account required unless they want to save picks across seasons. Our complete bracket pool guide covers setup, common scoring mistakes, and tips for keeping participation high, or go straight to the bracket pool page to start one.
Run One for Your Office, School, or Booster Club
A March Madness pool for the office scales the same way as one for a five-person group chat, and neither needs anyone to install anything. You create the pool or board, share one link by email, text, or a QR code on a flyer, and everyone else joins from whatever device they already have in their hand. Nobody needs a Pick My Square account except you.
For an office pool or booster club specifically, a couple of things matter more than they would for a family bracket: control over who joins, and someone other than you who can answer "how do I sign up." You can require approval on every join request, useful if you want to confirm someone's actually part of your group before they're in, or open it up so anyone with the link joins instantly. You can also name approvers, people who can review join requests and manage the board or bracket without being the owner, once you're not the only one fielding questions.
Squares boards cap out at 100 squares on a full 10x10 grid (50 and 25-square boards are also options for smaller groups), so a squares board is naturally sized for a department, a classroom, or a club roster rather than an entire company. A bracket pool has no real ceiling: joining stays open until the pool locks at its configured start round, and turning on late joining keeps new entries coming even after tip-off (they just can't score games that already started).
Prefer paper for a watch party or a bulletin board? Print a free blank 10x10 grid and fill in the digits with our number generator. It's the same grid either way, built for any matchup, March Madness included. Digital boards go back to paper too: once the numbers are drawn, the owner can export a squares board as a PDF, and a bracket's PDF becomes available once its pool locks or the tournament wraps.