What pick’em is
Pick’em is a parallel contest to Bones wagering — a crew can run either, or both. Instead of staking Bones, you just pick a side on each game in the week’s slate. Get it right and you score; get it wrong and you don’t. How much a correct pick is worth depends on which mode your crew runs — a flat point in most, or whatever you ranked it in Confidence.
Straight-up vs. against-the-spread
A crew that isn’t running Confidence grades picks one of two ways:
- Straight-up — pick who wins the game, period.
- Against the spread — pick who covers the point spread, which rewards correctly reading a mismatch, not just picking the favorite every time.
Confidence
A crew can also run Confidence, where picking the winner is only half of it. On a slate of sixteen games you also hand out the numbers 1 through 16, one to each game. A correct pick scores whatever number you put on it, so the real skill is knowing which of your picks you actually trust. Confidence always grades straight-up — the ranking is where the difficulty lives, so the call underneath it stays “who wins,” never “who covers.”
There’s no submit button and no deadline to finish ranking — assign, change, and clear numbers as you go. Each number can only be spent once, and the app shows you which are still in play. One wrinkle worth knowing: once a game starts, the number on it is spent for good, and the games still to come are re-ranked among whatever is left. You never lose the right to change a pick you haven’t started yet, but you can’t pull a number back off a game that’s already underway.
Locks
A pick locks the moment its game starts. You can change your mind as many times as you want before then; after kickoff, it’s final.
Grading and standings
Once a game ends, every pick on it grades automatically — no commissioner has to sit there scoring games by hand. Pick’em standings track correct picks across the voyage, separate from any Bones wagering standings in the same crew.