Illustration for article titled How to Create a Free Online Oscar PoolPhoto: Aurora Angeles (Shutterstock)

The Oscars are one of the biggest awards of the year. If you want to win your favorite actors, directors, and films, you can make the night more fun by creating an “Oscars Pool” with your friends.

What is an Oscars Pool?

With an Oscars pool, you and your friends can bet on who will win each category, either for money, bragging rights, or whatever you choose. Typically, you collect paper replies and ballots from everyone involved, but you can also do things virtually.

There are many Oscars betting sites out there, but they’ll cost you anywhere $ 15 to $ 500 depending on the number of people involved. Here’s another way to set up an Oscars pool online that is free.

Choose a money transfer app

Usually everyone in an Oscars pool buys a certain amount – say five dollars – to make their guesses. The key is to have enough people so that the winning pot is a sizable amount. So if your buy-in is $ 5 and you have 20 people, one lucky winner would get all of $ 100. However, you should agree on a specific money transfer app in advance to save yourself the mess of tracking payments. So decide whether to use Venmo, PayPal, or the app that most of your friends use.

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Use a free online poll to cast your vote

Online pools cost money and something They look pretty sketchy. So if you want to go the DIY route, you can easily use a website like Survey Monkey or Google Forms. For example, just sign up for the free basic account with Survey Monkey, click to create a survey, choose a free template (or a fancier one if you’re willing to pay a little), or start your own survey from Reason for new.

Your “Questions” poll should be any Oscars category, with multiple choice options for nominees as answers. You would do this similarly with Google Forms, but with a little more control over how the questions are answered, whether they are mandatory, and whether your respondents have the option to “pick all that apply” to their answers. Obviously, these additional details are not required. So choose the one that you and your friends are most familiar with.

When you are done creating the voting slip, limit polling access to those who have paid and just send it out.

When the big day comes on April 25th, consider keeping a live list to share with a group chat (if you have an enthusiastic group of friends) or wait for the Oscars to end and Go to your website for the full list of winners (for casual filmmakers who don’t even want to watch live). Then of course add up the points (if you feel like it, you can assign different point values ​​based on the “importance” of the various awards) and celebrate the winner.