Rules & Scoring

The format

• Bracket — pick the top two of each of the 12 groups, the 8 third-place survivors, then funnel your 32 qualifiers down: 16 into the Round of 16, 8 quarterfinalists, 4 semifinalists, 2 finalists, 1 champion.
• Player draft — pick 6 players from the 48 squads (max 2 per country). They earn (and lose) bonus points in every match they play.
• Lock — all picks lock at the opening kickoff: June 11, 2026, 19:00 UTC (South Africa – Mexico, Estadio Banorte). Picks are hidden from other players until then.
• Time-zone mercy — the pool admin can grant an entry a later personal deadline (late joiners, Australians…). Those entries are marked ⏰ on the leaderboard so everyone knows they locked late — and may have known early results when they picked.
• Changed your mind? You can delete your own entries (and create new ones) any time before the lock — afterwards every entry is part of the pool record.
• Accounts — creating an entry requires a free astraveris.ai sign-in (magic-link email, no password). Up to 5 entries per account. Entries marked ● on the leaderboard are account-backed; entries and final results are kept on record after the tournament ends.

• +3 exact group winner (×12 groups)
• +2 exact group runner-up (×12)
• +1 a top-2 pick that advanced, but not in your exact slot
• +2 each third-place pick that advances among the 8 best thirds
• +1 a third-place pick that advanced as a top-2 instead
• +2 per team in your sixteen that reaches the Round of 16
• +4 per team that reaches your Quarterfinals
• +7 per team that reaches your Semifinals
• +12 per team that reaches your Final
• +20 correct Champion
• +10 giant-slayer bonus: your champion is correct and is a first-time winner (not Uruguay, Italy, Germany, Brazil, England, Argentina, France or Spain)

Max bracket score: 12×3 + 12×2 + 8×2 + 16×2 + 8×4 + 4×7 + 2×12 + 20 + 10 = 222 (group picks score only once a group's six matches are final; knockout reach points land the moment a team is confirmed in that round).

• +4 goal by a midfielder or forward
• +6 goal by a goalkeeper or defender
• +3 assist
• +3 brace bonus (2+ goals in one match)
• +10 HATTRICK bonus (3+ goals in one match — stacks with the brace, so a forward hattrick = 3×4 + 3 + 10 = 25 pts)
• +4 clean sheet (GK/defender who started; team concedes 0; final whistle only)
• +3 clutch goal — scored in the 85th minute or later in a match decided by one goal or drawn
• −1 yellow card  ·  −4 red card  ·  −3 own goal

Penalty-shootout kicks never count as goals. Live matches score in real time (clean sheets settle at full time).

• +2 correct outcome (home / draw / away on the full-time score; shootouts don't count as wins)
• +3 extra for the exact scoreline (so a perfect call = 5 pts)
• Each match locks at its own kickoff — you can predict the whole tournament or day by day on the predict page. Points land in your total automatically.
• Other players' calls are revealed per match at kickoff (pool consensus shows on the analytics page).

• Each matchday, pick one team to WIN their match. A draw or a loss ends your run.
• Never reuse a team — each country works once per run.
• Skipping a day is allowed (friendly rules). Longest streak wins bragging rights — the board lives on the analytics page. No points into the main total.

Pick the tournament's top scorer (and their goal count) with your bracket — it locks at the opening kickoff. Equal totals on the leaderboard rank first by whoever's pick currently holds the Golden Boot lead (⚡), then by entry creation time.

After lock, a Monte-Carlo engine simulates the rest of the tournament 4,000 times: goals are independent Poisson draws (λ = 2.6 per match, split by bookmaker-implied team strength), group tables finish from the live standings, and knockouts use the real pairings once known (a seeded random draw stands in before FIFA's Round-of-32 grid is set). Every simulation re-scores every bracket; your P(win) is the share of simulated tournaments you'd win. Draft and prediction points are held at current values. Refreshed about every 30 minutes.

Scores, lineups, goals, cards, and field coordinates come from ESPN's public match feeds (site.api.espn.com · soccer/fifa.world), polled every 60 seconds while matches are live, every 10 minutes on tournament days otherwise. Group tables come from the same source's standings feed. The leaderboard recomputes after every poll. Win probabilities on match pages use an independent-Poisson goals model seeded with bookmaker over/under + moneyline (model inputs are shown on each match page). Team strength context — the #N badges next to teams and the simulation strengths — comes from the official FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking (11 June 2026 pre-tournament release, checked daily for new releases); simulated win shares use FIFA's own 1/(1+10^−Δpts/600) formula.

Equal totals rank by: ① whose Golden Boot pick currently leads the race, ② earlier entry creation time. (Simple, public, and impossible to game after the fact.)