Livescore Ticker: Every Game You Follow on One Screen
A livescore ticker is a strip of live scores that keeps scrolling on its own. You don't refresh a page, open an app or pick up your phone. It shows the games in progress, the ones still to come and the ones just finished, and it updates while it runs. To set one up, put a ticker in a browser on a spare monitor, a TV or an old laptop, choose your leagues and teams, and leave it running. The rest of this article covers what a good livescore ticker shows, how to read it, and how to make it show only what you care about.
What a livescore ticker is for
A score app answers one question when you ask it. A ticker answers questions before you ask them. It is the line along the bottom of a sports broadcast, moved onto a screen you own. Some ways people use one:
- Following a full slate of games while watching only one of them
- Keeping a favorite team's game in view during the workday
- Seeing finals come in without checking a phone every few minutes
- Leaving scores on a TV in the corner of a room while something else is on the main screen
All of these need the same thing: a screen that stays on and takes care of itself.
What a livescore ticker should show
A plain score can't tell you how close a game is. A useful ticker carries the context a broadcast gives you.
Live games
Every game needs the two teams, the score and the state of play: the inning, or the clock and the period. On top of that, each sport has its own details:
- Baseball: runs, hits and errors, the runners on base, the outs and the count, plus who is batting and who is pitching
- Football: which team has the ball, the timeouts left, the down and distance, where the ball is, and the last play in words
- Hockey and basketball: the score, the clock and the period
Games still to come
An upcoming game should list its start time and the channel showing it, so you can plan the evening from the strip. In baseball it helps to see the probable starting pitchers too.
Finished games
A final should be marked as a final, and it should say if the game went to overtime. In the playoffs, the round and the series score matter as much as the score of the game.
The moments that matter
Most of a game is routine. A good ticker flags the parts that aren't: a scoring play, a rain delay, a pitcher with a no-hitter going late in the game.
How to read the GridTicker strip
GridTicker is a live ticker that runs in a browser. Here is how a game looks on it.
| On the strip | What it means |
|---|---|
| Two teams stacked | Visitors on top, home team underneath, each next to a bar in its color, or its crest with Logos on |
| A lit-up score | The team that is ahead |
| A red dot | The game is live, with the inning or the clock and period next to it |
| The diamond, dots and 3-2 | Baseball's runners, outs, and the count (balls, then strikes) |
| Red down and distance | A football team inside its opponent's 20, the red zone |
| Final, or Final/OT | The game is over, and whether it went to overtime |
In the playoffs, the round's name sits under the clock, along with the state of the series. When a team scores, the play gets its own moment on the strip for two minutes, with the scorer's name. Basketball skips this because it scores too often. A rain delay keeps the inning where play stopped, so you know where it will pick up. In baseball, NO-HITTER BID shows up from the fifth inning on and names the pitcher.
Races and golf tournaments appear as a single running order, not two sides.
Make the ticker show only your games
A ticker loaded with every game in every league turns into noise. These switches cut it down to what you follow.
Choose what to include
Under What to show on the Sports settings page there are separate switches for Live, Upcoming, Final and Preseason. Upcoming reaches sets how far ahead the strip looks, from today only out to the next two weeks.
Put your teams first, or show only them
Star your teams under Favorites. A search box helps you find a team in a long list. Then pick one of two switches:
- Favorites first puts your teams ahead of the rest of their league.
- Favorites only shows only your favorites, league by league. A league where you haven't starred anyone still shows everything.
Add the standings
Standings tables can share the strip with the games. Pick the leagues you want under Standings. None are on until you pick some.
Where to put a livescore ticker
A ticker works best on a screen that would otherwise sit idle:
- A bar across the top of a monitor. The strip fits the space you give it, so a thin bar works.
- A TV in the corner. The same strip can fill a whole screen.
- A spare laptop or a Raspberry Pi. Any modern browser will do, and there is nothing to install.
Two settings help on any screen. Fit text to the screen sizes the text to the window's height. Pause on hover stops the strip while your mouse is over it, so you can read a score without chasing it. If you follow more than scores, Stack tickers in rows gives sports, stocks and news each their own row.
You can also set hours for each ticker, so scores show up in the evening and the screen stays quiet when you aren't watching.
A note on timing
Expect any livescore ticker to run a little behind the broadcast. GridTicker gets its scores from public sports data providers, which can lag the TV slightly. If you're watching the game itself, the strip will sometimes trail the picture by a moment.
How GridTicker helps
GridTicker is a livescore ticker made for a screen that stays on. It shows live scores and the detail around them, games still to come with their start times and channels, and finals as they come in. You can rank your teams first or show only them. Your settings follow your account, so the strip looks the same on every machine you sign in on. The guide explains every part of the strip, and the Sports settings hold the switches above. It costs $10 a month, on as many machines as you sign in on.
To keep your games scrolling on your own screen, set up a strip.