Office poolsStartaPool review

Website: startapool.com

You can run a pool on a spreadsheet. People do it every year, and it works right up until the first scoring dispute, the first person who forgets to submit picks, or the first week the commissioner is on a plane on Sunday afternoon.

RotoDB features StartaPool as its recommended provider for exactly that reason: it takes the administration off the commissioner and leaves the part people actually enjoy.

What it does

StartaPool runs the formats covered elsewhere in this section — survivor, reverse survivor, pick ’em and over/under — plus bracket pools. Scoring, eliminations and tiebreakers are handled for you rather than reconstructed by hand on Monday morning.

• Custom scoring, so house rules survive contact with the software instead of being quietly abandoned.
• A live scoreboard, so the standings move while the games do.
• Leaderboards and per-entry statistics, which is where most of the trash talk comes from.
• More than one sport and league, so the group does not disband in February.
• An iOS app, which matters more than it sounds — most picks get made on a phone, late.

Getting a pool running

Creating a pool is free and takes a couple of minutes: choose a format, set the rules, share the invite. The commissioner’s job after that is mostly chasing the one person who has not submitted picks, which no software has solved yet.

Worth knowing

Settle your house rules before week one rather than after a dispute. Tie handling, buybacks and strikes are all configurable, and all far easier to agree on while nobody has anything at stake. If your group has run the same pool on a spreadsheet for years, expect to spend the first week translating conventions rather than discovering them mid-season.

Create a free pool →