About pools and tournaments

What a pool is

A pool is a private prediction contest built around a single tournament. Someone sets it up, invites people, and everyone submits picks before the games start. As results come in, Trofeo.live scores each pick and updates a live leaderboard so the group can see who called it and who didn't.

Whoever creates the pool is its commissioner. That's the person who picks the tournament, names the pool, chooses the prediction format (winners only, exact scores, or both, depending on what the tournament supports), and controls how people get in, whether that's an open link, a passcode, or an invite-only list of email addresses. The commissioner's choices shape what everyone else sees: a pool can be wide open to browse, or locked down until a visitor signs in or enters a passcode.

You don't need an account just to look at a pool if the commissioner has left it open. But submitting picks always requires signing in, so your predictions are tied to you and show up correctly on the leaderboard. If the commissioner has restricted the pool to a specific list of emails, you'll also need to be on that list before you can join.

Free vs paid pools

Every pool is free for up to 10 players. That covers most friend groups, small office pools, and pickup leagues without anyone paying anything.

If you want more than 10 people in, the commissioner pays once to raise the player limit, there's no subscription and no per-player charge. Paying also unlocks branding: things like a custom logo, header image, and color scheme on the pool's page, which is mainly useful for workplace pools or anyone running a pool under a brand rather than a group chat. Pools created by an administrator on the platform skip both the cap and the payment, since they're meant to run without limits from the start.

How tournaments fit in

A pool can't exist on its own, it's always built on top of a tournament, whether that tournament is already live or hasn't started yet. The tournament supplies everything the pool needs to run: the schedule, the matchups, the stages, and, for competitions that have them, the group stage. Picking the tournament is the first thing a commissioner does when creating a pool, because it decides what people will actually be predicting.

Once the tournament is chosen, the pool follows it automatically. Players lock in their picks before each event starts, and once results come in, Trofeo.live scores those picks and updates the pool's leaderboard on its own, no one has to enter results by hand. If the tournament has a group stage, the pool's page reflects that too; tournaments without one simply don't show it. This is also why a pool is tied to one tournament for its lifetime: the standings, the format, and the scoring all depend on the specific competition it was built on.