User Picks

5-Lines: your number locks when you submit

Exactly five picks a week, on five different games that haven’t kicked off, graded against the spread.

The moment you submit, every pick is stamped with the line as it stands right then - the median spread across the US market, one number per game. That’s your number for good. Two players on the same team can be graded against different lines, and that’s the point: timing is part of the game.

• WYour team’s score plus your line beats theirs. A cover.
• PExactly level on your line. A push.
• LAnything else.

A canceled game is void and simply doesn’t count. Submissions are final. Standings rank by wins alone, and equal wins share a rank.

Death Race 100: first to 100, one loss and you’re out

Shane Ryan’s survivor format. Pick as many games as you like each week, straight up - just win.

• you 37
• a rival out at 23
• the leader 61

One pick per game, FBS against FBS only, and back the same team as often as you like. The first to 100 right picks wins the season. A single loss ends your run: your count freezes and you stay on the board, marked. A tied final voids the pick - an elimination takes a real loss, never a glitch in a score feed.

If nobody gets there, the season still crowns someone: the best count if everybody dies, the last one standing once they match it, or the highest total at season’s end.

One pool, many lenses

Everyone plays in one pool and is graded once. Picks are public the moment they’re in, even before kickoff - copying a rival’s card is fair game. Weeks flip at midnight Tuesday, Eastern, through the regular season, and skipping one costs nothing.

• Leagues A six-character code or an invite link. A league filters the one board down to your group and re-ranks it 1 to N - it never splits the competition.
• Live Covering or trailing, on every pick, while the games are on.
• Brag card Your own public page, and a card of your rank and record that unfurls wherever you paste the link.

No ads, no purchases, no analytics. Just the board.

Under the hood

One Flutter codebase on the web and iOS, over Firestore and TypeScript Cloud Functions. One server clock runs the whole season: each tick it pulls lines, scores games, moves live status, places the standings, sends notifications and posts the week’s board to X. Device clocks are never trusted - a kickoff cutoff is the server’s call.

The part I’m proudest of is the season simulator. A seeded generator writes a whole season in the line provider’s exact wire format, bots submit through the real submit function, and the clock runs virtually, so a simulation can never spend a credit and production can never serve a fixture. Same seed, same SHA-256. It plants the cases that break pick’em apps - an exact push, a canceled game, an elimination mid-run, two players hitting 100 in the same tick, a tied final - and checks that every one landed.

A full simulated season replays on every push, alongside the test suites and an end-to-end run through the real web app.