How to play SportStake 8

The operator states

The operator says this on their own how to play page, read Wednesday 29 July 2026. This site has not checked it.

The name changed, the game did not

Sizekhaya Holdings replaced Ithuba as the National Lottery operator on 1 June 2026 and renamed the SportStake pools to MatchPlay. SportStake 8 is now MatchPlay 8, on the same eight-match card. This page keeps the SportStake name because that is still what people search for, and prints the new name beside it.

Checked here

This is worked out from the operator's own published data. The check is a script in this site's repository, so anyone can run it again.

Sixteen symbols on an eight-match card, and what each block is

Every settled pool publishes sixteen symbols. Lined up against the scores of every match on file, symbols one to eight are the first-half result of matches one to eight, and symbols nine to sixteen are the second-half result of the same matches. That held on 80 of 80 non-void legs measured by the collector; the only three that disagreed were void matches carrying symbol 7. The results pages print the two blocks side by side per match rather than as one run of sixteen digits.

What the symbols mean

Here 4 is a home win, 2 is a draw and 1 is an away win, for the half in question, and 7 marks a void match where every pick counts. The TAB pools use 1 for a home win, so read a MatchPlay combination with the TAB key and you have it backwards.

Which levels pay

Four, published as 13/8, 14/8, 15/8 and 16/8: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen correct out of the sixteen forecasts. We read these off the settled draws we collect, not off a rule book.

Here is the count behind that check, for SportStake 8 alone: 22 settled pools and 176 comparisons. Each one puts a published symbol against the published score of the match in that spot. 96 agreed and 80 did not.

Not published anywhere

Things you would want to know that no public source states. They are written down as gaps rather than filled in with something that sounds right.

What a ticket costs

The public feed carries the card, the close time, the pool total and the settled payouts. It carries no ticket price, so this page leaves it blank and points you at the operator.

Half-time scores are not in the feed

The operator publishes the full-time score of each match with the combination, not the half-time score. So the results pages show the published symbols and the full-time score, and cannot line each half-symbol up against a half-score the way the other pools are checked. The block layout above was verified from the full-time scores of matches where both halves went the same way.