Lock

What lock is

Lock is the moment a Speed Survivor contest stops taking entries. It happens at the scheduled start of the game the contest is tied to. Before lock you can enter; after lock the field is fixed, and everyone in it plays the same twelve questions from the first round to the last.

Lock exists so that nobody enters with information the rest of the field did not have. Because the questions are generated from live play, a late entrant who had watched the opening drive would be answering with a head start. Fixing the field at kickoff keeps every entrant on the same footing.

An example

A Thursday night game is scheduled for 8:15 PM ET. Through the afternoon the contest fills; by the time the teams run out, it has its field. At 8:15 the contest locks. A friend who opens the app at 8:20 sees the game in progress but can no longer enter that board. They can watch, follow players on the leaderboard, and enter the next contest that is still open.

What is fixed at lock

At lock the number of entries is known, so the prize pool the entries fund is known too, and the payout tiers were published on the contest page before it. What is not known is who will survive, which is the part the game decides.

In Speed Survivor

Lock at kickoff is the start line and settlement the same night is the finish, so a whole contest runs about the length of the broadcast. If a game is postponed or interrupted, the Contest Rules say how the contest is handled. How it works covers what happens between lock and the split.