A week is too big, so you pick a slate
An NBA week carries something like fifty games. Putting all of them on a picks page is not thorough, it is unusable: nobody fills in fifty games on a Monday, and a pool where half the field stops submitting is over by December.
So Pick’Em and Confidence run on a slate — a short list of that week’s games, chosen automatically and weighted toward the nationally televised ones, which are the games your players were going to watch anyway. Five games by default for Pick’Em and ten for Confidence, and the commissioner can change the size or swap an individual game out before the week locks.
Survivor and Squares take the week as it comes
Not every format needs trimming. A Survivor pick is one team, so the size of the week is irrelevant — you get the whole schedule to choose from. Squares runs on a single game, picked by the commissioner, so it never saw the week at all.
One genuine wrinkle: in the NBA a team can appear two or three times in the same week, sometimes against the same opponent. Survivor pools can allow a team to be used more than once over the season or keep the one-shot rule, and that is the commissioner’s choice rather than something the league forces.
Built for a season that spans two years
An NBA season starts in October and ends in April, so it carries a year on each side of it. Standings, awards and season records are kept against the season rather than the calendar, which means a pool does not silently reset itself on New Year’s Day.
Scores arrive off the live feed, so nobody types a result into a spreadsheet. Picks grade themselves as games go final, standings move on their own, and the commissioner finds out who won at the same time as everyone else.
The money stays between you
Payment tracking and payout splits are built in. Players pay the commissioner directly — the money never passes through Poolr — and the pool keeps a record of who has settled up so nobody has to chase it in a group chat.
No ads. No banners, no sponsored rows, and no betting promotions between your picks.