Office sweepstakes, the Gambling Act, and why the exemption most workplaces assume they're relying on usually doesn't apply any more.
A Last Man Standing league is one of the easiest things to run in a workplace — provided no money changes hands. The moment there is an entry fee and a prize pot, UK law stops treating it as an office bit of fun and starts treating it as a lottery or a bet. The exemption most offices assume covers them is considerably narrower than people realise, and hybrid working broke it for a lot of organisations.
Under the Gambling Act 2005, an arrangement is a lottery when three things are true at once: people pay to enter, there are prizes, and the prizes are allocated by a process that relies wholly on chance. Running one without a licence is a criminal offence.
The useful consequence is that removing any single one of those three takes the arrangement outside the definition. No payment, no lottery. No prize, no lottery.
| Element | Present in a classic office sweepstake? |
|---|---|
| Payment to enter | Usually yes — everyone puts in £5. |
| A prize | Usually yes — the winner takes the pot. |
| Allocated by chance | For a name-out-of-a-hat World Cup sweepstake, yes. |
All three present, and you are running a lottery. That is the position the Gambling Commission's guidance describes, and it is why the exemptions below exist at all.
Prediction games sit slightly differently. Last Man Standing is not a draw — you choose a team using judgement, so it is not purely a matter of chance. But that does not make paid versions unregulated: staking money on an uncertain future event is betting, which is its own regime with its own rules. Swapping "lottery" for "betting" does not make the money question go away.
There is a specific exemption for lotteries run at work. It is real, and it is strict — every one of these conditions has to be met, not just most of them:
Selling entries by email or over Teams breaks the single-premises condition. So does including a colleague in another office. So does running the draw on a video call. A sweepstake that was perfectly fine in a single open-plan office in 2015 may not survive the same company being hybrid and multi-site in 2026 — and the people organising it are usually the last to know.
Anticiplay does not rely on any exemption, because two of the three lottery elements are simply absent.
| Element | On Anticiplay |
|---|---|
| Payment to enter | None The game is free. Anticiplay collects no entry fees, from anyone, ever. |
| A prize | None Anticiplay distributes no prizes. |
| Allocation by chance | Players choose a team on judgement, and the result is decided by real Premier League matches. |
There is no stake, so there is nothing to be a bet. There is no payment and no prize, so there is nothing to be a lottery. That is a description of how the platform works, not advice about your particular workplace.
This is also why a league runs happily in places a paid competition cannot: schools and colleges, public-sector teams with strict policies, distributed companies spread across several countries, and jurisdictions where paid betting products are restricted or prohibited outright.
Anticiplay never sees it, never handles it, and never knows about it — the rules say plainly that any money arrangement between players is outside the platform. But it changes the character of what your group is doing, and the platform being free does not travel with the money.
If you are thinking about a pot, that is the point to check the position properly rather than assume. The Gambling Commission's own guidance is the primary source, and law firms including Pinsent Masons publish plain-English summaries for employers.
Legality and permission are not the same thing. Even a free game can run into internal policies, and the sensible precautions are the obvious ones:
A common and tidy arrangement is to keep the two things apart: run the game free, and invite people to donate to a chosen charity through a normal fundraising page. The game stays free of payments and prizes, and the donations are just donations, not entry fees. If you intend to tie giving to participation, that is exactly the kind of detail worth checking first.
| Step | What it involves |
|---|---|
| 1. Create the league | Name it, set a four-digit admin PIN, get a code to share. Takes about a minute. |
| 2. Share the code | Post it in the team channel. People join with a name and an email — no password, no account, nothing to install. |
| 3. Link the matchday | Tell it which Premier League matchday the round refers to. This is the only manual step. |
| 4. Leave it alone | Results fill in from real scores, rounds settle themselves, players are emailed when they go through or go out. |
You have not missed it. A league starts on whichever Premier League matchday you point it at, so there is no season window to wait for — a team starting in November begins in November. Anyone who joins after a season is underway goes on a waiting list and is added automatically when the next season starts, which is usually only a few rounds away.
Full detail in the organizer guide. New to the format? Start with how Last Man Standing works.
Free to set up, free for everyone who joins, no entry fees and no prizes.
Get started →Not legal advice. This page describes how Anticiplay works and summarises publicly available guidance on UK gambling law, which is where most Last Man Standing leagues are run. It is general information, not advice about your situation, and it is not a substitute for speaking to a qualified adviser. Rules differ in other countries, and your employer's own policies apply regardless of what the law permits.