Score Your Seats: The SecondTicket Blog

How Fans are Combining Live Entertainment with Fantasy Sports and Office Pools


Preview of the 2019 Monday Night Ticket Score

The 2019 Monday Night Ticket Score (MNTS) features a big change to the scoring and weekly prize awards but still includes the biggest reasons fans play, which are the chance to win free tickets and $10,000 cash.

Here's What's Still the Same
It's free, open to all fans ages 18 and over, and only takes 30 seconds per week. Just guess the final score of the Monday night game and watch your free ticket credit balance redeemable only on our unique marketplace grow.

The season champion still wins between $200 and $500 in free tickets, depending on how many fans play during the season, and quarterly champions still win between $10 and $25.

Plus, 10 fans will play for $10,000 during the 2020 Super Bowl in Miami, and one of those finalists from the 2016 pool won $1,000.

Here's What's New in 2019
Previously, you earned points for any score prediction within 21 points of a team's final score and the top 35% of fans won tickets each week. Those thresholds are changing.

This year, points are only awarded for predictions within three points. It seems like a dramatic change, but it will only eliminate about 25% of the pool's points. The reasons we're doing it are to better reward fans who make accurate predictions and reduce the disparity between points in the MNTS and the other three pools that make up the 2019 Mega Pool (which features its own prize of $250-500).

We're also reducing the number of fans who win tickets each week but increasing the amount those fans win. Previously, the top 35% scored between $1-5. This year, five fans will win between $1-50. How?

Each week's top five fans will split a prize pool of $50 proportionate to their percentage of total points earned by those top five fans. Let's say, hypothetically, that Fans A, B, C, D and E score 100, 80, 60, 40 and 20 points, for a total of 300. Fan A's 100 points account for 33% of the total, earning that fan $17. Fan B wins $13, Fan C wins $10, Fan D wins $7 and Fan E wins $3.

Since only fans who predict within three points of at least one team will score points, it's possible that fewer than five fans would qualify for weekly awards. If, hypothetically, only one fan predicts either team's score within three points, that fan would win the entire $50. In 2018, there were two such weeks.

Tiebreakers - Earlier Predictions Matter More Than Ever
It's also possible that no fans predict within three points of either team. That has happened eight times in the 12 year history of the pool, although not since 2010. If it happens this year, all fans who picked the correct winning team will receive $5 - and only the first five fans to submit those picks will split the $50, as determined by the time stamp on your entry. Similarly, any ties among the top five will be decided by the earlier entry. Using the previous example, if Fan F also scored 20 points but submitted a prediction after Fan E, they would not be eligible for weekly prizes. (But their points obviously still count.)  

For a complete scoring explanation or an outline of how the 10 finalists who will play for $10,000 fans are chosen, or last year's scoring changes, please refer to our How The Pool Works or our 2018 pool preview.

Here's What Never Changes
The Monday Night Ticket Score will always be accessible to casual sports fans AND interesting to those with a deeper interest in sports analytics.

In the pool's 12 year history, there have been 12 different season champions, 39 unique quarterly winners (out of a possible 48) and 129 different weekly winners (out of a possible 192). In 2018, half of the weekly and quarterly winners were first time winners.

But the pool's outcomes are not totally random, there are incentives in place to encourage upset picks and infrequent NFL scores, we share advanced prediction stats such as degree of difficulty, and we frequently reference Scorigami, which shows the frequency of every combined actual final score in NFL history. Before submitting a prediction, we encourage all fans to use this interactive tool showing the win and cover percentages of teams in comparable NFL games since 2006,.

Ultimately, the odds of correctly picking one team's score are about 16-to-1. Of the nearly 32,000 individual team score predictions submitted by fans since 2006, they correctly picked a score 5.9% of the time.

So now is the time to play!  If you're on Twitter, follow @TheMegaPool for pool updates, tips and reminders or @SecondTicket for ticket news, information and basic pool announcements.

Good luck!


2020 WayCool Super Ticket Pool