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- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
Last man standing is the football competition every office seems to run: everyone pays in, picks one team a week to win, and goes out the first time their team doesn’t. You can’t use the same team twice, which is what makes it hard by week six. This free last man standing tracker does the admin. Add the players, type their picks each round, mark the results, and it knocks people out, flags anyone reusing a team and keeps the pot total until there’s one name left.
Last man standing football rules
The rules that almost everyone uses:
- Each round, every player still in picks one team to win its next match, usually in the Premier League or another single league.
- Win and you’re through. Draw or lose and you’re out.
- You can’t pick the same team twice in one competition.
- The last player standing wins the pot.
The ones that cause arguments are the edge cases, so settle them on day one. If all the remaining players go out in the same round, the common rule is they all stay in; the alternative is that the pot rolls into a new competition. If a match is postponed, most comps treat the pick as a win, or let the player choose again before the deadline. And a missed deadline counts as a loss. The CasinoCalcs tracker has switches for draws and for the everyone-out rule.
How long a last man standing lasts
Pick the favourite in a Premier League match and it wins somewhere between 50% and 75% of the time. With 20 players each picking a 65% favourite, about 13 survive the first week, 8 the second and 5 the third, and you’d expect to be down to the last one somewhere around week six or seven. The no-repeats rule makes it faster, because by then the obvious picks have been used. That’s why good players save the strongest teams for the later rounds, when there are fewer safe options left.
If you’d rather work out the odds of a pick surviving from the prices, the survivor pool calculator does that, and the 1X2 calculator turns expected goals into a win chance. For a one-off draw instead of a season-long game, try the sweepstake generator.
Running it with the tracker
Everything saves in your browser on this device, so the person running the comp should keep it on one phone or laptop. “Copy for the group chat” gives you a one-line update after each round, and “Print the table” shows every pick so far with the knocked-out names crossed through. If you make a mistake, “Reopen last round” puts the last round’s picks back so you can fix a result.
Keep the entry fee to an amount nobody minds losing. BeGambleAware.org has free support if betting on football stops being fun.