About Game Day Bars

Game Day Bars is built and operated by Brice, a lifelong sports fan and long-time product builder. GDB is a project of Secret Lab, LLC, a small independent studio based in the United States. We're not a media conglomerate, a VC-backed rollup, or a content farm. One human, one mission, and a whole lot of data.

Have a question, a correction, or a venue to add? Email [email protected]. A person reads it.

Our directory is built the way a librarian would build it. Every venue comes from a real, sourceable dataset — no scraped review site, no mystery listings, no paid placement.

• Source: venue records are pulled from Overture Maps, an open geospatial dataset jointly maintained by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom under the ODbL license. It's the same kind of data that powers modern mapping products.
• Enrichment: each venue is cross-referenced with public business data (opening hours, phone, website) and only kept if multiple sources agree.
• Deduplication: multi-signal matching (name, address, geocoordinates, phone) collapses duplicates so you see one entry per real place.
• Team affiliations:we assign each venue to the teams it's most likely to show, using a scoring model that looks at geography, naming, ownership claims, and community input. Affiliations are never paid — they're earned.
• GameDayScore: a transparent venue score that blends verified attributes (TV count, audio policy, vibe tags, check-ins) with community signals. Advertisers cannot buy a better score.

Mistakes happen at this scale, and we'd rather hear about them than pretend they don't exist. Wrong address? Closed venue? Wrong team? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.

Users never pay. We believe a sports-bar directory is a public utility, not a paywall. Here's how the lights stay on:

• Sportsbook affiliate partnerships. When a reader clicks a sportsbook link from our site and signs up, the sportsbook pays us a referral fee. Those links are clearly marked as affiliate links every time they appear. Sportsbook CTAs are only shown in states where online sports betting is legal.
• Venue subscriptions. Venue owners can claim their listing for free and optionally upgrade to a paid subscription for enhanced features, analytics, and priority placement in search. Paid placement is clearly labeled when it appears, and it never overrides GameDayScore ranking — a subscriber with a worse score does not leapfrog a non-subscriber with a better score.
• Display advertising. Standard web display ads from reputable networks. Ads are clearly distinguished from editorial.

We do not take money to rank venues higher. We do not remove negative reviews for a fee. We do not sell user data. If any of that ever changes, it will be announced here first. See our editorial process page for how content gets made, fact-checked, and corrected.

Own a sports bar or restaurant listed on GDB? Claim your listing to update your info, respond to community input, and access analytics. We'd love to work with you — especially if your place lives and dies by game day.