About

Welcome to The Call Stands. The goal of this project was to deliver an online experience for the sports betting games I like to play with my friends.

The typical routine involved receiving a smattering of texts throughout the week containing everyone's picks, logging them to a spreadsheet, receiving a flurry of texts on Saturday and Sunday morning, sending out screenshots of said picks to the group chat, and then enjoying some football. But that was just the first half of the fun. The next piece came after the final whistle on Sunday night, when time would be spent figuring out who covered, which totals hit, who won side bets, tallying up the pot, and finally sharing the results. Then doing it again week after week from August to February.

It's the most fun I have with buddies every week during football season. But after well over a decade of living in those spreadsheets (and after a few months of seeing the power of vibe coding relatively pointless websites and apps), it was time to go digital.

So again, welcome to The Call Stands. Your home for non-traditional sports picking games.

There's no shortage of games I've cooked up with friends over the years, but before we get overly experimental with what The Call Stands offers, we're starting with the game that brought us here in the first place. The Three Pick.

The Three Pick is easy to figure out. Pick three games, and you're playing. You can do this for NFL or NCAAF, but no mixing of the two (at least not in this current iteration).

The goal is to get a group of buddies together and make three picks each week. You can pick spreads, totals, or a mix of both. Only rule is you can't pick the spread and total from the same game. Each participant kicks a set number of points into the pool per week (the amount is up to your commissioner), and whoever goes 3-0 wins the pot. If nobody goes 3-0, the pot rolls to next week.

There are a few wildcards you can throw in there. Mulligans, if you pick a mid-week game and it loses (kick in more points to start fresh). Penalties for going 0-3. A one-tie-all-tie rule to keep pots from splitting and rolling over instead. Your commissioner sets the format.

At the end of the season, we tally how many points each of you have won or lost and figure out how things settle up. I suggest making each point worth a buck or so, but after that you can settle up with your friends off-platform however you'd like.

There are also side bet opportunities built into the platform. You send a bet to someone else and have those points added or subtracted from your season totals. The fun part is you can bet on basically anything. Your commissioner will settle those up.

As this gains steam, we'll add more games to the mix. Eventually I'll build in standard formats like survivor and pick-ems. Until then, feel free to send feedback and let us know what you'd want to see next.