Prizes & Tiebreakers

Set up cash or prize awards for your pool, and decide how ties get resolved when more than one player is still standing at the end of the season — or at the end of a division or league, if you're using Leagues & Divisions.

Setting Up Prize Tiers

From your pool's Settings page (or Step 4 of the setup wizard), open the Prizes section. For each prize you want to offer, you'll set:

Scope — who this prize is for: the Overall pool winner, a League winner, or a Division winner
Position — first place, second place, etc., if you're awarding more than one prize within a scope
Label — a name for the prize (e.g., "Grand Prize," "1st Place," "Office Pool Winner")
Amount — a dollar amount, if you're tracking cash prizes (optional — you can leave this blank if your prize isn't cash)
Display Amount — whether the dollar amount is shown publicly to players, or kept private
Badge Color — a color for the prize badge shown next to a winner's name on standings, pick history, and their player dashboard (8 colors available)

If you're using Leagues & Divisions, you can set up prizes at every level — for example, a small prize for each division winner, a bigger prize for each league winner, and your top prize for the overall pool winner.

You can add, edit, or remove prize tiers any time — before or during the season — as long as the prize hasn't already been awarded.

Tiebreakers: When More Than One Player Survives to the End

It's common for more than one player to make it to the final week still alive. You decide in advance how that gets resolved, using the Tiebreaker setting on each prize tier.

Split

The prize is divided evenly among all tied players.

Good for: cash prizes where you want a clean, no-argument resolution.

Margin of Victory

The tied player whose winning picks had the largest combined margin of victory throughout the season wins outright. (Margin of victory is the point difference in each game your pick won — a pick that won 30–10 contributes more than one that won 17–14.)

Good for: rewarding players who picked more dominant teams, not just teams that happened to win.

Keep Playing

Instead of resolving the tie, all tied players are revived and the pool continues into the following week — as if no one had been eliminated. This only works if there are more weeks left in the season.

If Keep Playing is selected and the tie happens in the final week of the season (so there's no following week to continue into), the pool automatically falls back to whichever tiebreaker you've set as the Tiebreaker Fallback for that tier.

Good for: pools where the commissioner wants ties resolved by more football, not by a formula.

Commissioner Decides

The tie is flagged for your manual review. You'll choose how to award the prize yourself from your Prizes page once the tie occurs.

Good for: pools where you want full discretion — for example, splitting differently than 50/50, or factoring in something outside the system's rules.

What Happens When a Winner Is Determined

When your pool (or a league, or a division) comes down to a single survivor, or a tie that's been resolved, the pool's status changes to Pending Review — you'll see an alert on your dashboard letting you know results are ready for your attention.

From there:

Visit your pool's Prizes page to see the winning entry (or entries, if tied) for each prize tier
Click Award Prize to officially mark a prize as given out
Once every prize tier in your pool has been awarded, your pool's status updates to Complete

Note: If you're running Leagues & Divisions, the system checks the overall pool, every league, and every division independently — so a division can finish and be ready for its prize while the overall pool is still in progress.

Need Help?

Check the FAQ or email us at support@thecommish.app.