Why there is no money in it
Betting money on an uncertain outcome is gambling, and gambling is licensed, age-gated, jurisdictionally messy and — for a group of friends arguing about a five-a-side — completely unnecessary. The interesting part of a bet with your mates was never the money. It was that somebody has to do the push-ups and everybody gets to watch.
So this is built so that money cannot get in. There is no field anywhere in the app that can hold a currency amount: a stake is a count of units of a real-world forfeit, and that is the only kind of stake the code can represent. There is no balance, no deposit, no withdrawal, and nothing to cash out.
The rule extends to stakes that are money in disguise. "Loser buys dinner" is a transfer of money with a receipt attached, and the custom-stake checker refuses it along with e-transfers, gift cards and covering somebody's tab.
What the app will not let you stake
Custom stakes are screened before a crew can add one. These are the categories that come back refused, and the reason each one is on the list.
Stakes cannot have monetary value. That is the one line this whole platform is built around.
Buying something for someone is a transfer of money wearing a disguise. Pick a stake that costs effort instead.
Nothing anyone has to consume. Forfeit games that settle in drinks are how people get hurt.
No eating or drinking challenges — same reason as the last one.
Nothing permanent or done to somebody’s body. Keep those deals off a ledger.
Nothing that involves taking clothes off.
No stake where the forfeit is pain or an impact to the body.
Forfeits have to land on the person who lost, not on somebody who never agreed to any of this.
Nothing that changes somebody’s job or relationship.
No stake that needs somebody to do something unsafe in a car.
The caps, and why they exist
A parlay multiplier applied to a physical forfeit is a genuinely dangerous object. Forty push-ups on an eighteen-leg-adjusted 18x slip is 720 push-ups, and somebody will try to do them in one sitting to prove a point.
So every unit carries two ceilings. The per-ticket cap clips a payout after the multiplier — the only place it matters — and the outstanding cap limits how much one person can owe another at any moment, across every unpaid ticket between them. When a cap bites, the slip says so and shows what fair value would have been. It does not hide the clip.
Physical
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💪 push-ups Sets can be spread across the day. Nobody has to do these in one go. | 150 | 300 | yes |
| 🔥 burpees | 75 | 150 | yes |
| 🦵 air squats | 200 | 400 | yes |
| ⏱️ seconds of plank | 300 | 600 | yes |
| 🏃 kilometres run | 10 | 21 | yes |
Chores
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🍽️ loads of dishes | 12 | 20 | yes |
| 🐕 dog walks | 10 | 20 | yes |
| 🗑️ garbage nights | 8 | 16 | yes |
| ❄️ driveways shovelled | 6 | 12 | yes |
Favours
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🚗 rides Airport runs count double by tradition. Settle that in the crew, not here. | 5 | 10 | yes |
| 📋 shifts covered | 3 | 5 | yes |
| 🍿 movie picks surrendered | 8 | 12 | yes |
Social
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖼️ days with their photo as your avatar | 14 | 30 | no |
| 💬 days of naming the group chat | 14 | 30 | no |
| 🤐 hours of silence on the topic | 48 | 96 | no |
| 👕 days wearing their team's jersey Their jersey, borrowed. Nobody buys anything. | 7 | 14 | no |
| 📣 public shout-outs admitting they were right | 3 | 6 | yes |
Creative
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🎤 karaoke songs of their choosing | 3 | 6 | yes |
| 📜 limericks written in their honour | 5 | 10 | yes |
| 🎬 highlight reels edited | 3 | 5 | yes |
Date night
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💆 minutes of back rub | 60 | 120 | yes |
| 🦶 minutes of foot rub | 45 | 90 | yes |
| 🥞 breakfasts in bed | 3 | 6 | yes |
| 🍝 dinners cooked Cooked at home. Takeout is money, and money never counts here. | 3 | 6 | yes |
| 🌹 date nights planned Planned, not paid for: a picnic, a sunset walk, a dinner cooked in. Nothing bought counts. | 2 | 4 | yes |
| ☕ mornings of coffee brought to bed | 7 | 14 | yes |
| 📺 nights of control of the remote | 7 | 14 | yes |
| 😴 sleep-ins covered You get up with the kids, the dog or the alarm. They do not. | 3 | 6 | yes |
| 💌 love notes written | 5 | 10 | yes |
| 🕺 slow dances in the kitchen | 5 | 10 | yes |
Time
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| ⌛ minutes of a chore of their choosing | 240 | 480 | yes |
Tokens
| Stake | One ticket | Owed at once | Splittable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔷 tokens Tokens move by themselves the moment the bet settles. You earn them by paying forfeits — they cannot be bought and are worth nothing outside 1v1. | 500 | 100000 | yes |
Consent is per person, not per crew
Anybody can switch off physical forfeits entirely, or block individual units, from their own Crew screen. Once they have, no ticket can be written that puts them on the hook for it — including an open challenge they might otherwise have taken. A crew can also ban a unit outright in house rules, which overrides everybody's willingness.
Forfeits have to land on the person who lost. A stake that requires somebody outside the crew to do, receive or put up with anything is refused — they never agreed to play.
Settling and arguing
Every market carries a written settlement rule from the moment it goes up, and it is printed on every ticket that touches it forever. That sentence is the whole point: write it as though you are settling an argument three weeks from now, because you are.
One person reports the result and the other confirms it. Two different calls put the ticket into dispute, where it stays until the crew's named judge rules — no amount of further grading gets it out. Nothing on a ticket can be edited after the fact, including the calls that turned out to be wrong.
A ticket nobody grades inside the crew's window voids on its own, and nobody owes anything. An ungraded wager sitting around generating bad feeling is worse than no wager.
What a market is allowed to be about
The stake rule has a twin: a forfeit lands on the person who lost, and a market is about something that person opted into. Anyone in your crew is fair game, because they joined. Sports, weather, politics and prices are fair game, because they are nobody in particular.
Named people are where it gets narrow. A market naming somebody who is neither in your crew nor a public figure is refused outright — people who did not opt in do not get traded on. For public figures, their public conduct is fair game and their body is not: nothing about anybody's health, and nothing that prices somebody being hurt.
Comparative longevity — who outlasts whom, between two public figures — is allowed, and is priced from survival curves on age and sex alone. A market on whether a particular person dies by a particular date is not, and no phrasing gets around it. The difference is that one is an argument about actuarial tables and the other puts a clock on somebody.
Where the odds come from
Nowhere else. No price on this board is bought or copied. For every league, completed results are walked in date order and a rating is updated after each game; those ratings give a spread and a total, and every other market is derived from that pair by arithmetic.
How well that works is published rather than asserted — the model page shows each league's Brier score against a coin-flip baseline, how many games it was fitted on, and which leagues barely beat chance. Questions that no model can price open at even money and move on votes instead.
Tokens: earned by paying up, never bought
Tokens are the one stake nobody has to perform. You start with 50, and the only way to earn more is to pay a forfeit and have the person you owed confirm it — more if you paid on time, more again on camera, up to 60 a day. Winning a bet earns nothing.
There is no store, no top-up and no pay model, and there never will be. Tokens cannot be bought, sold, sent or cashed out, and they are worth nothing outside 1v1. Honour — every token you have ever earned by keeping your word — never goes down, and it is what unlocks rings, record cards and bigger token limits. A new player can risk 50 tokens on one bet; the limit grows only as they prove they pay.
Callouts: public only when both of you agree
A callout is one claim, one stake, and two people: the one who says it is true and the one who takes the other side. It can be aimed at somebody or left open — vs TBD — for anybody to take. An open callout is on the public board only if its author puts it there, and taking one means agreeing to be shown beside it. A callout between two named people stays a private link until both flip it public, and either can flip it back.
Both sides call the result; if they disagree it sits disputed until one concedes. Callouts pass the same subject screen as any market, plus a screen for slurs, links, emails and phone numbers, and three reports take one off every board.
Where your crew's data lives
Your crew — its members, its tickets, its ledger, its chat and picks — lives on your device. There is no account and no email. If your crew turns on sync, one copy is also kept on our server so every member's phone shows the same thing live. It is unlocked only by the random key in your invite link; we store a fingerprint of that key, never the key, and we do not store which member a phone is acting as. Anybody holding the invite link can join as a member, so send it to your crew only. Crews that never turn sync on stay on their phones, kept in step by share code, exactly as before.
Turning on notifications stores your phone's push address against your crew and player so we can tell you when a bet is taken, settled or owed. Turning them off deletes it. Final scores for automatic grading come from the public scoreboard; they carry nothing about you.
Two things are served rather than local, and both are deliberately impersonal: the priced board, which is static files containing no user data, and vote tallies, which are counts against a random id your browser makes up for itself. That id is not an account, is linked to nothing, and losing it costs you nothing but the ability to change an old vote.
Callouts are the exception, because a stranger has to be able to find one: the claim, the stake, the names the two people typed and the history of the callout are stored on our server. No account, no email — each side holds a random key on their own phone and we keep only a fingerprint of it. Rate limits use a scrambled form of your address that changes daily and is deleted within the hour.