A short, straightforward glossary with the terms that come up most often when setting up a football or NBA prediction pool: from Spain's traditional Quiniela to NBA playoff formats.
Seeding is the system that orders teams in a bracket or draw based on their previous position or ranking, to keep favorites from meeting too early. It's used both in the NBA playoffs and in European football competitions, though with different criteria.
Read full definitionThe overall standings are the table that ranks all of a Match Prophets league's members by points accumulated throughout the season: games played, exact scores, correct outcomes, and total points. It updates itself as soon as each match ends, with nobody needing to add anything up by hand.
The wooden spoon is the informal English nickname for the team that finishes bottom of a league standings — in Spain, the same concept is called "farolillo rojo" (red lantern). Its origin traces back to 19th-century British universities, where a wooden spoon was jokingly awarded to the student with the worst grades. Every country has its own equivalent nickname.
Read the full guideA handicap is a virtual advantage or disadvantage applied to one of two rivals before a match, to even out their odds on paper. It's mostly used in sports betting, with two main variants: the European handicap and the Asian handicap.
Read full definitionHead-to-head is the record of direct meetings between two teams: how many times each one has won and how the scorelines have gone in their previous matches. On Match Prophets you can check it before predicting each match as extra context, though it's never a guarantee of anything.
Read the full guideIn a football or basketball league, a matchday is the set of matches played during the same round of the calendar, in which each team usually plays one match. On Match Prophets you predict each matchday's matches before they kick off; once they start, your prediction locks.
A private league on Match Prophets is one that only whoever receives the invite link directly can join, unlike a public league, which is visible and open to any user. Most prediction pools among friends, family, or coworkers are set up as private leagues.
An exact score is a prediction that matches a match's final result down to the last goal, for example predicting 2-1 and the match ending 2-1. In Match Prophets' default scoring system, nailing the exact score is worth 3 points, the maximum possible per match.
The play-in is the round before the NBA playoffs, introduced in 2020, in which the teams ranked 7th through 10th in each conference battle for the last two spots in the playoff bracket before the playoffs properly begin.
Read full definitionThe NBA playoffs are the knockout phase that decides the champion, with the top 8 seeds of each conference facing off in a best-of-seven series each round: first round, conference semifinals, conference finals, and the NBA Finals.
Read full definitionThe Pleno al 15 is the special category of the Spanish Quiniela, introduced in 1988, in which you have to predict the exact score (number of goals) of the fifteenth match on the ticket. It only counts if you've also gotten the 14 previous 1X2 predictions right.
Read full definitionAn exact prediction is one where a user calls a match's complete score before it starts, not just who wins. It's the level of accuracy that earns the most points in Match Prophets' scoring system.
Quiniela and porra are used almost as synonyms in Spanish, but they're not the same: the quiniela is the official betting game run by Spain's state lottery board, with tickets and cash prizes; the porra is the informal game among friends, with no money involved, and rules set by the group itself.
Read the full guideThe global ranking is the standings that compares every Match Prophets user against each other, beyond your private league, with a further breakdown by country. It lets you see how your accuracy stacks up against the rest of the world in each competition.