How to Run an NHL Hockey Pool (2026-27 Season)

To run an NHL hockey pool, you need five decisions: what counts as a “week” in a sport that plays most nights, how many games each player picks, when picks lock, which format you run, and how you break ties. Settle those five and the rest is invitations and a prize list.

Before any of that, one honest clarification, because it decides whether this guide is useful to you at all.

Draft pool or pick’em pool? They are not the same thing

A large share of people searching for a “hockey pool” — especially in Canada — mean a fantasy-style draft pool: you and your coworkers draft individual skaters and goalies, and you score whatever points those players produce over the season. Trades, waivers, injuries, the whole thing.

A pick’em pool is a different game. Nobody drafts anybody. Each player picks which teams will win a set of games, and points come from getting those results right. It takes about two minutes a week and needs no roster management from anyone.

Both are good. They are not interchangeable, and a group expecting one will be annoyed to find the other. Everything below is about running the pick’em style — the family of formats covered on the NHL pool formats page.

What does a hockey pick’em pool actually look like?

Players see a list of games and choose a winner for each one, or for as many as the rules require. Games lock at the time you set, results score automatically, and the standings update — a weekly table plus a season-long leaderboard with a podium at the top.

Hockey is supported in Pocket Office Pool alongside twelve other leagues, so a commissioner can run the same formats they would run for football: pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor (where you pick a team to lose and survive by losing), and single pick.

One structural advantage over soccer: every NHL game produces a winner, so you never have to write a rule for what happens when a game ends level.

How do you define a “week” when games run most nights?

This is the problem that defines hockey pools, and it is why most people who try to run one give up by November.

Football hands you a week for free: sixteen games, almost all on Sunday, one lock time, one scoring window. Hockey does not. Games run on most nights from October through April, teams play different numbers of games in any seven-day span, and no natural slate exists.

So you invent one. The common approaches:

Monday to Sunday. Simplest to explain. Picks are due before the first puck drop on Monday.
Thursday to Wednesday. Puts the deadline midweek, which some groups find easier to remember than a Monday morning.
Weekend only. Friday, Saturday and Sunday games only. Fewer games, fewer excuses, and it keeps the pool feeling like a weekend ritual.

Pick one, write it in the rules, and do not change it mid-season. The season calendar is worth a look before you commit, especially if you plan to run more than one sport across the year.

Picks per week is the setting that makes hockey playable

Here is the practical heart of running a hockey pool. A seven-day window can hold sixty or more games, and no one is picking sixty games every week in February. Participation collapses, and a pool nobody fills out is not a pool.

The fix is the Rules tab setting “Picks per week (N of M)”. Leave it at 0 or blank and every player picks every game. Set it to 10 and each player picks ten games from the board. Same slate for everyone, but each person chooses which ten they are confident about.

That change does two useful things at once. It cuts the time cost of playing down to a couple of minutes, and it adds a strategic layer — you are not only picking winners, you are choosing which games to stake anything on.

For a first hockey pool, 5 to 12 picks a week is a sensible range. Start lower than you think: it is easy to raise the number next season and awkward to lower it midway through this one.

Should you use a curated slate instead?

The other option is to narrow the board itself rather than the number of picks. The Rules tab offers a curated weekly slate — only commissioner-selected games appear on Make Picks. The app recommends this for college football, where the game count is enormous, and the logic applies cleanly to hockey.

A curated slate lets you build the week around games your group will actually watch: national broadcast nights, rivalry games, the local team’s schedule. Ten hand-picked games beat sixty arbitrary ones for a casual office group, every time.

The tradeoff is your time. If sitting down weekly to choose sounds like a chore you will abandon by Christmas, use picks per week instead. Many commissioners combine both: a curated slate of about twenty games, with players picking ten of them.

When should hockey picks lock?

Time zones make this messier than football. A slate can start at 7:00 pm Eastern and still have a game starting at 10:30 pm Eastern on the west coast. If picks stay open all evening, whoever submits late has information the early submitters did not have.

The clean answer is a single lock before the first game of your window. Everybody picks blind, everybody is equal, and there is nothing to argue about. The Weeks tab handles locking, either week by week or with “Lock all weeks” when you want the whole season fixed. Letting people pick game by game instead is a legitimate choice, but decide it deliberately and tell the group which way you went — more on that in these commissioner tips.

Does survivor work in a hockey pool?

It works, but it burns much faster than football, and you should design around that rather than be surprised by it.

In an NFL survivor pool you make one pick a week across eighteen weeks, and a strong favorite is genuinely strong. Hockey gives you more games, a flatter talent distribution, and a goaltender who can steal any single night. Pick the best team in the league against the worst and you are still a long way from safe. Run a weekly hockey survivor pool with thirty entrants and you can be down to a handful inside a month.

Three adjustments help:

Allow a buyback. The season runs from October into April, so letting eliminated players buy back in once, early, keeps people checking in.
Use a longer pick window. One pick per week rather than per night, so a bad bounce on a Tuesday does not end someone’s season before Halloween.
Run it as a side game. Season-long pick’em as the main event, survivor alongside it. When survivor ends in November, the pool does not.

The mechanics match the football version, so the walkthrough in how to set up a survivor pool transfers directly, as does the format overview on the survivor format page.

How should tiebreakers work in a low-scoring sport?

Football tiebreakers lean on a total-points question, which works because a combined NFL score lands somewhere in a wide range. Hockey totals are single digits and cluster tightly. Ask for the combined goals in the nightcap and you will get eleven people writing 6.

Two tiebreaker choices are available, and the ranking rule matters as much as the question:

The question — total points (combined score) or margin of victory.
The ranking — closest, or closest without going over.

For hockey, margin of victory is usually the better question, because it spreads answers out more than a combined total does, and “closest without going over” punishes optimism in a sport where guessing high is the obvious move. Whichever you choose, say it in the rules before week one. The reasoning behind each option is covered in this guide to pool tiebreakers.

What does it cost to run one?

The first four players are free. Beyond that it is $3 per player, so ten players cost $18 and twenty cost $48. The rate drops to $2 past 30 players and $1 past 100, and billing is per unique person rather than per pool — the same coworker in your hockey pool and your football pool is one seat, not two. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Your first week: a commissioner checklist

Confirm with your group that they want a pick’em pool, not a draft pool.
Choose the format: pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor or single pick.
Define your week and write it down in one sentence.
Set picks per week, or build a curated slate — or both.
Set the lock time and decide whether it is one lock or per game.
Choose the tiebreaker question and the ranking rule.
Post the rules and any payment details on the commissioner sticky note, which shows on the Dashboard and Make Picks screens.
Invite everyone at least four days before the first lock, and send one reminder the day before.

Do that and the pool runs itself. If hockey is not the right fit for your office, basketball has a similar nightly-schedule problem and a similar set of fixes — see the basketball pool options — and the wider survey of what plays well at work is in office pools beyond football.

When you are ready, read the NHL pool overview for format details, then create your pool and get the invites out before opening night.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a hockey draft pool and a hockey pick’em pool?

In a draft pool you select individual players and score the points they produce all season, like fantasy hockey. In a pick’em pool nobody drafts anyone: you pick which teams win their games and score points for correct results. Pick’em takes a couple of minutes a week and needs no roster management, which suits an office group better.

How many games should each player pick each week?

Fewer than you think. A seven-day NHL window can hold sixty games, and nobody fills that out twice. Use the “Picks per week (N of M)” setting to require ten picks from the full board, or curate a shorter slate yourself. Between 5 and 12 picks a week keeps participation high without making the pool trivial.

How do you define a week in a hockey pool?

You define it yourself, because hockey has no natural weekly slate. Common choices are Monday through Sunday, Thursday through Wednesday, or weekend games only. Any of them works. What matters is writing the definition into your rules before picks open and leaving it unchanged all season, so nobody is guessing at deadlines in January.

Does survivor work over a full NHL season?

It works, but it ends early. More games and flatter matchups mean survivors go out faster than in football, and a thirty-person pool can be down to a few players within a month. Consider allowing one buyback, keeping picks weekly rather than nightly, or running survivor alongside a season-long pick’em pool.

What should you use as a tiebreaker in a hockey pool?

Margin of victory usually beats a combined-score question, because hockey totals are single digits and dozens of people will write the same number. Pair your question with a ranking rule: closest wins, or closest without going over. The second discourages everyone from guessing high. Decide both before the season opens.