Baby Pool Template: 3 Free Charts to Print or Copy (Guess Sheet, Date Grid, Points Board)

Somebody at the shower says "we should do a baby pool" and suddenly you are the person holding a pen and a napkin. You need a chart, you need it now, and you would rather not design one from scratch while the cake is being cut.

Here are three baby pool templates that cover every way people actually play. Print the one you need, copy it into a spreadsheet, or scroll to the end for the version that fills itself in. All three work on the same baby pool idea: everyone guesses, the baby decides, the closest guess wins.

Pick your template in ten seconds

You want...	Use
Everyone guesses date, weight, sex and more	Template 1: the guess sheet
One big chart on the wall, one square per person	Template 2: the due date grid
A fair winner across several guesses	Template 3: the points board

Most family showers use template 1. Offices love template 2 because it hangs by the coffee machine. Template 3 is the add-on that stops the arguing afterwards.

Template 1: the guess sheet

The classic. One row per player, one column per thing you are guessing. Copy this table onto a sheet of paper, or into any spreadsheet, and add as many rows as you have guests.

Name	Birth date	Time	Boy or girl	Weight	Length	Baby's name	Points
Grandma June	Oct 14	3:15 am	Girl	7 lb 9 oz	20 in	Eleanor
Uncle Dev	Oct 18	11:40 pm	Boy	8 lb 2 oz	21 in	Theo

A few things that make the sheet work in practice:

• Print the due date at the top so people have an anchor. Half your guests do not know it off by heart.
• Ask for exact values. "About 8 pounds" and "sometime in October" cannot be scored. Pounds and ounces, a date, a time to the minute.
• Leave the points column empty. That is filled in once, after the birth, by whoever keeps the sheet. Template 3 tells you how.
• Drop the columns you do not need. If the sex is already known, cut it. If the name is a locked secret, that column becomes the most fun one on the page.

For ideas on what else to add (hair color, first word, who the baby will look like), we have 30 prediction questions that fit right into extra columns.

Template 2: the due date grid

This is the "baby pool chart" most people picture: a grid of dates and times where each person claims a square, and the square the baby lands in wins the pot. Sports-pool energy, nursery colors.

How to make one:

1. Rows are dates. Start two weeks before the due date and end two weeks after. That covers the large majority of births; anything outside the grid goes to a house rule (see below).
2. Columns are time blocks. Four blocks of six hours is the friendly version. For a big office, split the day into hours so there are more squares to sell.
3. One name per square, first come first served. Write in pen. Squares get "traded" otherwise.
4. Decide the outside-the-grid rule now. Simplest: if the baby arrives before or after the grid, the closest occupied square wins.

Here is the top of a grid for a due date of October 16:

Date	Night (12 to 6 am)	Morning (6 am to noon)	Afternoon (noon to 6 pm)	Evening (6 pm to midnight)
Oct 2
Oct 3
Oct 4
...
Oct 16 (due date)
...
Oct 30

Copy the pattern for every date in your window and you have 29 rows by 4 columns: 116 squares, enough for a large office. If people want more than one square, charge per square and let them. If the group is small, shrink the window to one week either side.

The grid version of a baby pool is really a bet on the birth date, and there is more strategy to it than you would think. Our guide to the birth date betting pool covers where the smart squares are, including why the due date itself is a surprisingly weak pick.

Template 3: the points board

If your sheet has more than one guess column, you need a way to combine them. Otherwise the person who nailed the date but was two pounds off on weight argues with the person who did the opposite, and both of them are right.

The points board fixes that. Score each category separately, then add them up.

Category	Max points	Full points for	Zero points beyond
Baby's name	20	Exact match	Anything else
Boy or girl	10	Correct	Wrong
Weight	10	Exact, to the ounce	1 lb (500 g) off
Length	5	Exact	2 in (5 cm) off
Birth date	5	Exact day	7 days off
Birth time	5	Exact minute	2 hours off

Between "full points" and "zero", scale it down evenly: a weight guess that is 8 oz off scores about half the weight points. Write the totals into the last column of the guess sheet, highest total wins.

Doing it by hand at 2 am with a newborn in the room? Use the paper shortcut: 5 points for the closest guess in each category, 3 for second closest, 1 for third. It is cruder, but it adds up in a minute. The full reasoning behind the weights is in our baby pool rules, including how to settle a tie.

The four lines to write at the top of any template

Whichever chart you print, add these four lines above it. They prevent every dispute we have ever heard of.

1. Entries close on [date, at least two weeks before the due date]. Nothing after that counts.
2. One guess per person, in pen, no changes.
3. The parents do not play. They have seen the ultrasound. They are the referees.
4. The official numbers come from the hospital record, and the winner is decided by [closest date / points board / square on the grid].

That last blank is the important one. Decide how you win before anyone guesses, and the reveal stays a party instead of a hearing.

Or skip the paper entirely

Every template above has the same weak spot: it lives on one piece of paper, in one house. Cousins abroad text their guesses to someone who forgets to write them down. The sheet gets a coffee ring. And on the big day, a sleep-deprived new parent is doing ounce arithmetic in a hospital chair.

The online version takes the same three templates and does the boring part for you. Start a baby pool, put the QR code on the shower table (or pin the link in the office chat), and everyone fills in their own row from their phone. The deadline closes itself, the points board scores itself the moment you enter the real birth details, and the leaderboard is live for the whole family, wherever they are. For a work pool, the office baby pool page has a setup that fits a team in five minutes.

Paper or phone, the point is the same: a whole room of people who love this baby, on the record with a wild guess, waiting to find out who was right. Print the chart, hang it up, and let the guessing begin.