What is NFL pick'em? Rules and how to play in 2026

If you’ve been invited to a pick’em pool and have no idea what you just agreed to, this is for you. NFL pick’em is one of the oldest, simplest ways to make the season more fun, and once you’ve done it for one week it clicks immediately. Here’s the whole thing in plain English.

What is NFL pick’em?

NFL pick’em is a game where you predict the winner of every NFL game each week. You make your picks before the games kick off, and after they finish you get a point for every game you called correctly. Add up your points, compare them against everyone else in your pool, and the person with the most at the end is the winner. That’s the core of it.

No money has to change hands, no betting knowledge is required, and you don’t need to watch every snap. You just need an opinion on who’s going to win.

How a week actually plays out

The NFL regular season runs from September through early January, with a set of games (usually 13–16) each week. A normal week of pick’em looks like this:

• Picks open. Once the week’s schedule and odds are set, you can make your picks.
• You pick a winner for each game. Favorites, underdogs, the Thursday nighter, all of them.
• The deadline hits. Picks lock when each game kicks off, so you can’t change a pick once its game has started.
• Games play, points land. As results come in, your correct picks score and you climb (or slide down) the leaderboard.

Then it resets and you do it all again next week, all the way to the end of the season.

Do you have to pick every game?

In most pools, yes, you pick a winner for every game on the slate. That’s what makes it “pick’em”, you’re not choosing a couple of favorites, you’re calling the whole board. It also means everyone is working from the same set of games, so the leaderboard is a fair fight.

The main pick’em formats

“Pick’em” gets used loosely, so it helps to know the variations you’ll run into:

• Straight pick’em — pick the winner of each game, one point each. The classic.
• Odds-weighted pick’em — pick winners, but correct underdog picks are worth more than safe favorites. This is how PickemSZN’s original game works, and it’s covered in detail in How pick’em scoring with betting odds works.
• Against the spread (ATS) — instead of just picking winners, you pick teams to beat the point spread. Harder, and a great equalizer. See Against the spread explained.
• Confidence pool — rank your picks by how sure you are, and the confident ones are worth more if they hit.

If you want the family tree of pool types and which one suits you, I wrote a whole comparison: Pick’em vs survivor vs confidence pools.

How to start playing pick’em for free

You don’t need a spreadsheet or a group text with 40 unread messages. PickemSZN is a free NFL pick’em game: make your picks each week, compete on a global leaderboard, and spin up a private league for your friends if you want your own board.

Here’s the short version of getting going:

1. Create a free account.
2. Open the Picks page each week and pick a winner for every game.
3. Watch the leaderboard, both the global one and any leagues you’re in.

That’s NFL pick’em. Simple to start, genuinely hard to master, and a lot more fun than just watching. Come make your picks at pickemszn.com and I’ll see you on the leaderboard.