A RunYourPool alternative with no money in play

Both products solve the same problem from opposite ends. RunYourPool gives a commissioner a website with a very large catalog of pool formats and the option to take entry fees. Office Rivals gives a Slack channel a bot that runs the whole thing with no money in it at all.

Office Rivals vs RunYourPool

What changed when Splash bought RunYourPool

Splash Inc. acquired RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool and announced it publicly in June 2023, in the same announcement that launched Splash Sports. The announcement describes Splash Sports as "a real-money gaming platform built for friends and groups to compete in games of skill", and says the company "does not allow games against the house and is entirely focused on empowering commissioners (contest organizers) to safely and legally run their own peer-to-peer contests". It reports the combined audience growing "from 600K to 2.2M active users over the last 18 months".

Peer-to-peer with no house edge is better for players than the alternative, and running contests legally is what a regulated operator should be organized around. The consequence for a workplace is a separate question from whether the change is good: a pool that used to be a spreadsheet with a website attached now lives inside a real-money gaming platform, and participation in real-money contests requires age and jurisdiction eligibility. That is the sentence that tends to end the conversation with a compliance team, whatever the merits of the product.

The honest verdict

Use RunYourPool if you want entry fees collected and winners paid and your group is eligible for that. Use it if your pool is a format we do not run: squares, confidence, golf, NBA, MLB, NHL, college bowls, the Oscars, the Olympics. Use it if your players are spread across companies, clients or a family group chat, because a website reaches people a Slack workspace cannot. And use it if you want the commissioner controls a website has and a chat bot deliberately does not: spreads, best bets, confidence points, a Monday night tiebreaker, pools in the hundreds.

Use Office Rivals if the pool is for one company, it lives where your coworkers already talk, and you would rather not be the person holding an envelope. Nobody creates an account, because being in the channel is being in the pool. There is no money, so there is nothing to approve. And the rhythm is built for an office: picks arrive as a private DM, and the recap and standings land back in the channel on the first working morning after the games, never during the weekend.

The tradeoff is that we are narrower on purpose. Five competitions, no squares, no spreads, no money. If the narrowness is a problem, the other product is the better one for you.

Ready to start?

Office Rivals is free for your first 5 players, with no card and no trial clock, so you can see whether your coworkers engage before you pay anything. A one-time season pass from $129£99€109 lifts the cap to 100 players for the whole season: one payment, no subscription, no per-player fee. The pricing page has the full ladder, and the NFL page shows what a week looks like in the channel.

If you are still choosing a format rather than a tool, how to run an NFL office pool compares pick'em, survivor, confidence and squares without pushing any of them. For the other chat-native option in the market, we compared ourselves with Guul too.