2 simple ways to enhance your Super Bowl party through gambling

Before cable TV and the internet, when everyone had only four networks, there was basically a 25% chance that the night before you watched the same show as your bus driver, or your kid’s teacher. And as a result you had something in common to discuss the next day with virtually anyone. Basically everyone in America watched the finale of MASH. I miss that aspect of limited technology. So enjoy this opportunity to share an experience with your fellow man.

The other thing that makes the Super Bowl great is the gambling.

Sportsbooks make all kinds of exotic proposition, or “prop”, bets available for the Super Bowl. These bets hone in on the smallest details of the game and can make even the most mundane plays of the game interesting.

Combine the communal experience and the fact you can bet on what happens virtually every minute of a five hour span and you pretty much have a perfect storm of happiness.

To make sure everyone enjoys the Super Bowl as much as I promise you I will, we’ve put together two documents to enhance your Super Bowl watching experience, be it at a party, a bar, or the back of an Uber trying to get into Uptown to celebrate. So print out a stack of these bad boys and bring them with you wherever you’re watching. Below are the ground rules for each game.

Squares Game

The squares game takes a little forethought to pull off, but it might be the best way to keep a crowd of people engaged throughout the entire Super Bowl. Squares is entirely random and requires zero knowledge of the teams involved or even the rules of football, which is great if you’re watching the game with people who aren’t NFL fans.

To play, print out the sheet and determine how much you’d like to charge to purchase a square. This amount is typically $1 or $2. It needs to be low enough so that at least 80 of the squares are filled. Pass it around the party and have everyone “buy” however many squares they want, and then put their initials in that many boxes (i.e. if you buy $10 worth of squares and they cost $1 each, you’ll put your initials in 10 different squares). The location of the squares you choose is completely irrelevant at this time.

Once all the boxes or filled and/or everyone has bought all the squares they’d like, randomly draw numbers from 0-9 and put them across the top and down the left of the grid. I like to pull out a deck of cards A-9 and make a big show of selecting the numbers. I’m a showman like that. Once you fill in the numbers, everyone who is participating will know what their numbers are before the game starts.

Here’s a description of how to score the game from footballsquares.net:

“A winner is usually determined at the end of the 1st quarter, 2nd quarter, 3rd quarter, and Final Game score. The winner is determined by looking at the last number in each of the teams’ score, and then matching those numbers on the grid and seeing which square intersects those two numbers. An example would be if the Miami Dolphins were playing the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, and the score at halftime was Miami Dolphins 33, and NY Giants 24. The last number for the Dolphins is 3, and the last number for the Giants is 4. The square on the grid that has the Dolphins with a number of 3, and Giants score of 4, would be the winner.”

Prop Sheet

The prop sheet is considerably less complicated. Set a price for each sheet ($5 is generally good). Everyone who buys a sheet takes a guess for every bet. At the end, tally up the number of correct answers for each bet. The participant with the most correct answers wins. Told you it was easy.

Of course another fun game is to root for the Panthers to win and put a cap on this magical season, ensuring that we’ll have a Championship Parade through Uptown on Tuesday. I’m so excited for that to happen.

Good luck.