Six Nations tipping
The Six Nations is the easiest comp of the year to get a rugby room to join and the one most often set up badly, because the Championship has a bonus point system of its own and a tipping comp has to decide whether to copy it. Here is the 2027 shape, the decisions that follow, and where Fanzava fits.
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The Six Nations runs on Fanzava's live data feed, so the Championship arrives built: five rounds, six weekends, every kick-off time and every lock countdown in New Zealand time. A rescheduled fixture updates itself. What you set up in January is the scoring, not the calendar.
Three matches a round, a winner in each, plus whatever else you have asked for. Locks are per fixture, so a Friday night opener closing on Saturday morning here does not close the later games with it. Reminders go out the day before and again in the hour before the first lock.
Scores come off the feed on the final whistle, and overall standings and every group leaderboard update together. Nobody is up at 4am waiting on you, and the standings are there when they wake up.
One fallow weekend sits between Round 3 and Round 4 in 2027. A recap, a standings email or a Banter Board argument across that fortnight is the difference between a full field on 5 March and half of one.
Three matches, one day, staggered kick-offs and a Championship that is usually still live in the last of them. On New Zealand time that is Saturday night into Sunday morning. A comp that treats the final round like any other throws away the best night of the tournament.
The Six Nations has a scoring system of its own, and the first decision is whether your comp borrows it. Everything else follows from that.
Winners only is easy to explain and works for a room where half the people are following along because everyone else is. Mirroring the real table, so a correctly called four try bonus or a losing bonus scores, rewards people who predict the shape of a match rather than just the name at the top. It is also more to enter and more to explain. Start simple in Round 1 if your field is mixed; you can add it next year without rebuilding anything.
A drawn Test is worth two points to each side in the real table, and a comp offering only home or away has no way to express one. Your three honest options are a third option on every fixture, voiding the fixture for everybody when it is drawn, or awarding the point to nobody. Draws are rare enough that this rule sits unused for four rounds and then decides the comp, which is exactly why it has to be written before Round 1 rather than argued about after.
If you ask for margins, seven points is where the interest is, because that is the boundary the Championship's own losing bonus sits on. A correctly called five point defeat says something about how well somebody read the match. Set a tolerance band rather than demanding an exact number, or the ladder is all zeroes by Round 2.
Three matches on one day with the title live in all of them is the single best stretch of your comp. Double points for the final round, a separate Super Saturday leaderboard, or a set of one off calls made that morning all work. Treating it as another three fixtures is the most common thing organisers regret.
These are one off predictions made before Round 1, not per match tips, and they need their own scoring. The Grand Slam and the Triple Crown may go unclaimed in a given year, so decide whether an unclaimed honour scores nothing for everybody or is voided. The wooden spoon always lands on somebody, which makes it the one call that is guaranteed to resolve and the one that keeps a comp interesting for whoever tipped Italy in January.
The Championship itself can be shared when two unions are level on match points, points difference and tries. Your comp can be too, and a fifteen match tournament produces far more ties than a long season does. Nominate a tiebreaker in advance, usually the margin on one designated Super Saturday fixture, so the last match settles the comp rather than a coin toss on the Monday.
A winner in every match, five rounds, six weekends. The default, and the right call for a mixed office where most people want a reason to have an opinion over the weekend.
Rank your three tips each round by how sure you are and score the rank. With only three matches a round it is the cleanest way to add depth without adding admin, and it rewards conviction rather than hit rate.
Six nations, five rounds, one pick each and no repeats. The arithmetic fits this tournament better than almost any other: a full field cannot survive to Super Saturday, and nobody runs out of teams before the end.
Championship winner, Grand Slam, Triple Crown, wooden spoon and top try scoring nation, all locked before the first kick-off in February. It takes two minutes to enter, it brings in the people who will not commit to five rounds, and it runs alongside everything else.
Fixtures, kick-off times, lock countdowns and results all arrive on their own, from the opening Friday night in Dublin to the last whistle on Super Saturday. The rest of rugby union comes off the same feed, so the Rugby World Cup, the Rugby Championship, the United Rugby Championship, Premiership Rugby, the Top 14, Super Rugby and Japan Rugby League One are all there when March runs out. You set the scoring, and then you are a tipper like everybody else.
Paid plans run full white label across every screen, every email and every notification. Pro and above add a custom domain and a custom email sender, so the Super Saturday recap arrives from your address and nobody sees our name at any point.
It starts in the first week of February, it finishes on 13 March, and it is short enough that the people who joined late are never out of it. For a rugby club or office that makes it the natural warm-up for the Super Rugby comp that follows.
Every rugby room has someone backing Ireland, someone backing France and someone who just wants England to lose. Group leaderboards run alongside the overall one, and the Banter Board gives six weekends of northern hemisphere rivalry somewhere to live that is not your inbox.
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Want a comp that runs itself all season? See Premier League tipping →