How to play PrizePicks

You pick two or more players and say More or Less against the number PrizePicks puts on each of them. That is the whole thing. There is no price on the square, which is the first thing that throws anyone coming from a sportsbook, where the price is most of the bet. Here what you get paid comes from how many players you took and which play type you are on.

A square shows the team and position, the player, the opponent and kickoff, the number, and the two buttons. The flame and the number next to it is how many people are on that square. A red Demon or a green Goblin is a non-standard payout, and some of those offer More only.

Your lineup goes into a group with other members’ lineups and first place takes the top number. Everything under that is the minimum, and the minimum is the only number worth handicapping against, because finishing first is not in your control.

Read the last chip again. On Flex, two correct out of three pays 0.75x — seventy five cents back on the dollar. That is a smaller loss, not a win. It is the number that makes Flex feel softer than it is.

Work backwards from the minimum. Three picks at 4.25x needs every leg landing about 62% of the time just to get your stake back. Flex, counting the 0.75x on two of three, comes out around 61%. They land in the same place: Flex is softer on the night and not cheaper over a season.

Sixty two percent a leg, three legs deep, is a high bar. It is why the question is never whether you like a player tonight — it is whether you like him enough that stacking two more on top still makes sense. Most legs that look fine on their own are not fine three deep.

These two rules cost people money every week and almost nobody reads them.

DNP. If your guy does not record an offensive snap, his square comes out of the lineup. It is not scored a loss — which sounds like a let-off — except that every removed square drops your payout one tier. Your three-pick now pays like a two-pick. Check the status of all three about an hour before kickoff, every time.

Reboot. A player who starts, goes off and never comes back in the second half is rebooted, at the same cost. It applies to More squares only, and if he had already passed the number before he went off, the square still wins.

The DNP line is different in every sport, and the one that catches people is hockey: an NHL goalie has to start, and is DNP’d even if he comes in later and plays. In the NBA, WNBA and NHL one second of game time is enough. On the PGA Tour the player has to finish the whole listed period, and beating the number early does not save it. In NASCAR he has to start the race. And in every sport, both players in a Combo square have to play or the whole square comes out.

If an NFL game is officially ended before ten minutes have elapsed in the fourth quarter — the clock hitting 5:00 — every Less square in it is DNP’d and every More square scores as normal. Worth knowing before you load up on Less in a game with weather in the forecast.

One more that is easy to get wrong: a sack does not count against a quarterback’s rushing yards. Negative yardage only comes from a tackle for loss on a designed run, or a kneel. If you were taking Less on a scrambler behind a bad line, sacks are not doing the work you think they are.

Open a player and you get his number, a bar for each of his last five games with the line drawn across them, and the average of those five. That is the whole panel. There is no hit rate on it and there is no sixth game.

It is genuinely useful and it is also the most dangerous thing on the screen, because five bars sitting above a line looks like a pattern and five games is not a pattern. We measured what that kind of recent-form read is worth on our own board: across more than five thousand basketball line-nights the rate we were leaning on claimed about 48% and the lines actually came in at 39%. Nine points of air. That is basketball and hockey, where a season has enough games to count properly — football never will at seventeen.

What I use instead is how far a player’s average sits above the line, not how many bars cleared it. Call it the cushion. A line of 40 receiving yards against a 42-yard average has cleared plenty of times and has two yards to spare; one quiet first half and it is gone. The same line against a 58-yard average is a completely different leg, and both of them show you five green bars.

In this order, because the order matters more than any single rule.

1. Throw out everyone I cannot find ten games for. That takes out most kickers and anybody just off a bench. 2. Pull ten games on the rest, divide by ten, and cut anybody whose average is not clear of the line with room — ten or fifteen percent of the number in daylight is roughly the floor. 3. Look at the shape of those ten, and throw out the ones carried by two big games. Four big nights and six nothings averages the same as ten steady ones and is not the same bet.

4. Check the volume before the matchup. Is he on the field, is the ball going to him, and only then who is across from him. The gap between a good run defence and a bad one is a few yards a game; the gap between twelve carries and twenty is the whole square. 5. Look up what a sportsbook charges for the same number. Past -175 I do not take it — at -175 you need about 64% just to break even, at -250 about 71% — and a square priced steeply at a book is not cheap here, it is just hiding the price.

What comes out the other end of a few hundred squares is two or three. Sometimes one. Sometimes none, and a night with nothing on it is a real answer. That is the hardest part of any of this, because you opened the app to bet something.

Every leg, the line, the play type you were on, and how it finished, wins and losses both. You will remember the good ones and forget the rest. A month of a real written list tells you which of your reasons were doing work and which ones you came up with afterwards. Mine goes on the site because putting it where people can see it keeps me from drifting; keep yours in a notebook if you like. Without one you are not handicapping, you are having opinions.

Every leg RiskMode publishes is graded in public at the posted price: NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB.

This is a referral link. You get whatever PrizePicks is offering new players and RiskMode gets the referral credit. The guide above reads the same either way, nothing on this page is advice, and nothing on it is a promise about money.