Terms of Use

It is a free game, not a sportsbook

The Slate has no entry fees, no prizes and no wagering. There is no money in it at all, no way to add any, and no mechanism in the product that could take a payment. You are playing for your place on a leaderboard among the people in your pool, and nothing else.

The Slate is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the NCAA, ESPN, any conference, any school or any team. Team and conference names appear only to identify real games.

Who can use it

• You must be at least 13 years old.
• If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian’s permission first.
• One account per person. A second account used to enter the same pool twice is grounds for removing both.
• Use an email address you actually control. It is how you confirm your account, how you sign in, and how you set a new password if you forget yours.

Your account

You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for what happens under your account.

Your display name is what other people see. It does not have to be your real name, and in a public pool you should assume anyone can see it. The Privacy page has the detail.

If a pool has an access key, that key is stored only as a one-way hash. It cannot be looked up or recovered by anyone, including us, and it cannot be changed after the pool is built. If the pool admin forgets it, the pool needs rebuilding.

Pools, slates and picks

The person who builds a pool chooses its slate — which conferences, which teams and which weeks are in play. Everyone in the pool picks a winner in each game on that slate.

• Picks lock when the game kicks off. That rule is enforced in the database, not just on the screen. A pick that arrives after kickoff is refused, and it cannot be overridden for one player and not another.
• A pool freezes when its first game starts. From then on the slate, the access settings and who can join stop changing, and nobody new can join.
• Scoring is one point for each correct pick. Players who are level share a place; there is no tiebreaker.
• A cancelled game is worth no points to anyone, including people who picked it.
• Picks belong to a pool. The same game in three pools is three separate picks.

Fair play

The whole product depends on a leaderboard people can trust. Any of these is grounds for closing an account or removing a pool:

• using more than one account;
• trying to pick after kickoff, or to defeat the lock in any way;
• trying to read another player’s picks before kickoff;
• automated picking, scraping, or hammering the site;
• a display name or pool name that is abusive, impersonates someone else, or is otherwise offensive.

We may rename or remove a display name or a pool name, or close an account, if one of these applies.

Scores come from somewhere else

Schedules, kickoff times and results come from ESPN’s public data, pulled automatically about every fifteen minutes during game windows. That data can be late, incomplete or wrong.

A site admin can correct a result by hand, and a correction can change a leaderboard after you have already looked at it. We do not guarantee that any score, result or standing is correct or up to date.

What we do not promise

The Slate is new software running a private beta on free hosting. It may be slow, unavailable, or wrong. It may lose data. It may change substantially, and it may stop.

It is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of it — including a leaderboard that turns out to have been wrong. The Slate is free, so the remedy available to you is to stop using it.

Leaving, and removing a pool

You can stop using The Slate whenever you like. If you want your account deleted, the Privacy page explains what happens and what to do.

A pool admin can remove a pool up until its first game starts, and not afterwards. If you are the only person in it and nobody has made a pick, it is deleted outright. Otherwise it is hidden from everyone rather than erased, because erasing it would destroy other players’ picks along with it.

Changes to these terms

When these terms change, the date at the top of this page changes with them. If a change materially affects how you use The Slate, we will say so on the site before it takes effect.

Questions

There is no contact address on this page yet. One goes here before the private beta opens on 29 August 2026, once PlayTheSlate.com is connected. The Slate has not opened to players yet.