Office hockey pool without a draft: predict the scores instead

Most office hockey pools die the same way. Somebody organises a draft in early September, four people cannot make the call, two of them end up with rosters they never wanted, and by American Thanksgiving half the participants have stopped checking. The pool did not fail because people lost interest in hockey. It failed because it asked them to manage a fantasy roster all winter.

A score-prediction pool removes that entire layer. Everyone predicts the same games, everyone stays in until March, and nobody needs to know which fourth-liner is on a hot streak. In trefa.app you pick a league, invite people with a link, and the app scores every game automatically against a shared leaderboard. There are no stakes, no odds and no payouts — it is a points game.

Draft pool vs. prediction pool

The second column is the one that survives a whole season in an office, a fan club or a group chat, because the cost of participating is about thirty seconds per game day.

Which leagues are loaded and when they start

Seven European top-flight seasons are already in the app, with full regular-season schedules pulled automatically from a sports API. Nobody enters a fixture by hand.

Kick-off times are shown in Central European Time — the local time at the arena for every league in that table.

About the NHL: the 2026/27 regular season is not fully loaded yet. Our data provider has published only the September exhibition games so far, and the rest appears as soon as it is released. If your pool is specifically an NHL pool, that is worth knowing before you send invitations.

Cut the season down to a size people finish

A European regular season runs 44 to 52 games per team from mid-September to early March. Predicting every game in a league means well over three hundred predictions, which is a hobby, not a workplace competition.

The team selection step fixes this at creation time. Tick one club or a handful, and the pool shows only the games those clubs play, home and away. A single-club pool comes out at roughly two predictions per week across the whole winter — small enough that people keep doing it in February, which is when most pools quietly end.

You can widen the selection later from the admin settings. The one restriction is logical: a team whose game somebody has already predicted cannot be removed.

Overtime and shootouts settle on regulation time

Hockey never ends in a draw on the ice, and that is exactly where most pools end up arguing. Here the rule is fixed and worth knowing before the first game day: regulation time is what gets predicted.

If the score is level after the third period, the app strips the deciding overtime or shootout goal and compares your prediction with the score at the end of regulation. A game that goes into the standings as 3–2 in a shootout is settled as a 2–2 draw. The points go to whoever predicted a draw — not to whoever guessed who would convert the shootout.

Tell participants this at the start of the season; it is the first thing that surprises people in a hockey pool. It also makes the game cleaner, because predicting a draw is an honest call on a tight match rather than a guess about one penalty shot.

Everything else is yours to set. As the founder you define the scoring rules: what an exact score is worth, what a correct winner is worth, what a correctly predicted draw is worth, plus an optional bonus for nailing the exact score. From then on every game is scored automatically, identically for everyone. A walkthrough of the common models is in scoring rules.

What hockey pools here cannot do yet

Worth stating plainly: goalscorer predictions are not available in the European hockey leagues. That feature needs player rosters, and the rosters for these competitions are not available from our data source. Scores are what gets predicted.

Everything else works as normal — a shared leaderboard, prediction history, a chat for the whole pool, reminders before each deadline, and personal statistics per participant.

Why European leagues suit an office pool

There is a practical reason these seven seasons work well for a workplace or a group chat, and it has nothing to do with the standard of hockey.

The schedule is predictable. Each league plays on the same two or three weekdays all season — the Czech Extraliga leans on Friday and Sunday, the SHL on Saturday and Thursday, the DEL on Sunday and Friday, the Swiss National League spreads more widely across Saturday, Friday and Tuesday. People learn the rhythm within a fortnight and the pool stops needing an organiser to nag anyone.

There is no long winter break. Unlike domestic football, these seasons run continuously from mid-September to early March. A pool that starts in September is still alive in February, which is where most workplace competitions quietly die.

The games are in European evening hours. For anyone in Central Europe, deadlines fall between 17:00 and 20:00 local time rather than in the middle of the night — a difference that matters if you have ever tried to run an NHL pool from Europe and watched half the group miss every deadline.

Deadlines, reminders and latecomers

Predictions close at puck drop for each game — not an hour before, not after the first goal. Whoever predicted, predicted; whoever missed it scores zero on that game. It is the one rule that cannot be changed, and that is deliberate: any exception starts an argument about fairness within a week.

Against forgetfulness there are phone reminders shortly before each deadline, which each participant switches on or off for themselves.

The other thing a six-month season needs is the ability to join late. Pools keep filling up after the opening rounds — someone hears about it from a colleague, someone comes back from a trip. A latecomer simply starts predicting from their first game; earlier rounds are not back-filled. Over a full season that gap is recoverable, especially if your scoring weights an exact score much more heavily than a correct winner.

A closed group, not a public game

A pool run for a workplace or a supporters' club is not meant to be open to the internet. Entry is by invitation link or QR code — without the link, nobody gets in. The QR code also works offline: put it on a slide at a club event, in a members' newsletter or on the shop door.

Inside the pool there is a chat for the whole group, so the banter around predictions does not scatter across separate threads, and the appearance can be set to club colours. Every participant gets personal statistics — hit rate, streaks of exact scores, comparison with the rest of the group. Over a long season that is usually what keeps people predicting after the top spot is out of reach.

Setting one up

1. Sign in to trefa.app with Google.
2. Create a pool and pick ice hockey plus one of the leagues above in the competition tree.
3. Choose teams — the whole league, or just the clubs your group cares about.
4. Set the scoring — exact score, correct winner, treatment of overtime.
5. Invite people with a link or QR code and start predicting.

Predictions close at puck drop for each game, so nothing can be filed after the fact, and a reminder can be pushed to each participant's phone shortly before the deadline.

Two leagues, one leaderboard

If a single league is not enough, multiple leagues in one pool merges several competitions of the same sport into one chronological fixture list and one combined leaderboard — SHL together with HockeyAllsvenskan, for example, or DEL alongside the Swiss National League. You choose the leagues when creating the pool and can add more later.

Terms and prices are on the pricing page. If you are setting this up for a supporters' group rather than an office, start with prediction pools for fan clubs.