Live Breaks at Ultimate Autographs: The Full Rules

If you've watched a few of our streams and want to know exactly how the thing works, this is the page. Formats, the randomizer, box numbers, the rules that settle weird pulls, and where Golden Tickets fit.

The rules page is the official word and it wins any argument with this post. This is the plain-English version.

The format

Every break we run is an eight-spot divisional break.

Eight spots, eight NFL divisions. You buy a spot, the randomizer gives you a division, a box gets opened, and the team on the item decides who takes it home. There's no picking your team and no paying extra for better odds. Everybody in the break has the same one-in-eight shot.

What changes between listings is how many boxes get opened at once:

• Single break. One box, one item, one winner.
• Double break. Two boxes opened back to back, so two items and two winners.
• Quad break. Four boxes, four items, four winners.

Price scales with the boxes. A spot in a double costs twice a single, a quad four times. Your odds on each individual box stay at one in eight. You're just in more boxes.

Buying a spot

Pick a series from the live breaks page and add a spot to your cart. Each series listing tells you the headliner checklist, how many boxes the series holds in total, and how many are left.

Breaks run in the order they fill, not on a fixed clock. Once the last spot in your break sells, it goes into the queue for the next show. If two breaks of the same type fill at the same moment, the one with more boxes goes first.

Shows are at 9am, 12pm, 3pm and 6pm Central, every day of the week, on Twitch, YouTube and Facebook. Your name shows up on screen when your break starts.

Box numbers and the wheel

Once a break is full, the host asks in chat for a box number. This is the part new players miss and then ask about afterward.

The first valid number typed by a customer is the box we open. If you'd rather not pick, type "wheel" and we'll randomize it. For a double break you need two picks, so "wheel x 2" or "wheel wheel" if you want the wheel for both.

Box picks are final. Once you've called a number or the wheel, that's the box. We don't rerun it.

If the wheel lands on a box number we no longer have, we go to the closest number still available. If two numbers are equally close, those two go in the picker wheel and it decides. And once a series is down to ten boxes or fewer, the host can put every remaining number in the picker wheel instead of using the standard one.

When the pull has no team on it

Sooner or later a box produces a college item or something with no team at all, like a Hall of Fame helmet. There's a written rule so nobody has to argue about it.

• If the player is currently active, the team he plays for decides the division.
• If he's not active, it's the team he played the most regular season games for.
• If the item has an inscription tied to a year, an achievement or a team, that inscription decides it.

We call this the tenure rule and it's on the rules page in full.

Golden Tickets

Some boxes hold Golden Tickets instead of a signed item, and they're tied to a division the same way an item is. They're our rewards currency and they're earned through play, never sold.

Tickets bank in your account until you want them. You spend them in The Locker, a members-only room of high-end signed pieces, where every item is priced in tickets so you can see what you're working toward. The Locker opens at Practice Squad, the second tier of our rewards program, and stays open as you move up. The Golden Tickets page has the detail.

Trading

You can trade with other players in the break room, inside a few limits.

• Both people have to be playing in our room.
• Every item in the trade has to have been won in the same show. Something won at noon can't be traded at three.
• No more than six items in one deal.
• A trade counts only when both sides agree in chat and the host says it out loud. If you didn't hear the host acknowledge it, it didn't happen.

Anything arranged outside the break room is between you and the other person. We can't unship a package, and we're not the referee for deals we didn't hear.

Shipping

Winners get their items shipped. Keep your address current in your account, because we ship where you tell us and we can't recover a package sent to an old address.

One thing to know before you play from outside the lower 48: Canada, Alaska and Hawaii count as noncontiguous, and winners there get a shipping invoice emailed separately. It has to be paid within 30 days or the item goes back into inventory.

What you're actually buying

A break spot is a chance at an item, not the item. Every listing says so, and we'd rather repeat it than have somebody misunderstand.

What we can promise is the part we control. Every signed piece carries a certificate from JSA, PSA, Beckett or Fanatics. Every series publishes its checklist before you buy. Every break happens on camera, randomizer included. We won't sell a signed item that isn't authenticated by a third party, and we don't run this out of somebody's garage. Twelve full-time breakers do this as their whole job, and you can meet them here.

The breaking business has plenty of operators who'd rather you didn't ask these questions. We'd rather you did. If you want the long version of why we're worth trusting, that's on our legit page and our authentication page.

Getting started

Watch a show first. It costs nothing and it'll make more sense in ten minutes of watching than in any amount of reading.

When you're ready, grab a spot from the live breaks page, read the rules, and come say hello in the chat. New to the format entirely? Start with how live breaks work. Want to know what you might pull? Our guides to helmet types and custom versus licensed jerseys cover most of what comes out of a box.