Info › Help › Matches & CueScore

How does live-match watching work?

By default, a live scoreboard match is visible only to the two of you playing it — nobody else can open it or see it update. Live-match watching is an opt-in extra on top of that: switch it on, and one of your own accepted connections can find your match while it's still live and watch it update in real time, the same view your opponent already has.

The setting is Let my connections discover and watch my live matches, and it's off by default for every member — nobody can turn it on for you. On iPhone it's a toggle in Settings, in the Privacy section, alongside Read receipts and Typing indicators. On the web app, the same toggle sits on your Profile page. Either way, it only affects your own matches, and only while it's switched on.

To actually watch, a connection opens the same Live Scoreboard button used to start a match — on the Map tab — and looks under Watch a connection's match. If there's nothing of yours to watch, or they're not connected to you, that section just says there's no live match right now, the same as if the feature didn't exist for them.

Whether a watcher actually sees who you are is decided per player, not per match. For each of the two of you separately, a watcher sees a real name and live score only if that player has switched watching on for themselves, and the watcher holds an accepted connection with that specific player. Your opponent's own setting has no effect on whether you're shown, and yours has none on them — a connection to one of you never carries over to the other. Whichever condition isn't met for a given player, that player shows to the watcher simply as Opponent — never a name, and never worked out indirectly from anything else on screen.

Watching is read-only. A watcher can't add a point, call a foul, pause the match, or touch the board in any way — there's nothing for them to do, and nothing they do (there is nothing) is ever visible to either of you.

The only thing watching adds beyond the match itself is a bare, unnamed count of how many people are currently watching. That count is shown only to a watcher — neither player ever sees it, on either platform, whatever either of you has switched on.

Turn your own toggle off and anyone currently watching you loses access immediately — access is re-checked every time, not only when they first open your match. The same is true the other way round: watching always ends the instant a match stops being in progress, whether it finished normally, was ended early, or simply went stale. A watcher can't reopen a match once that happens — trying just shows You can no longer watch this match.

8nOut keeps a short record of which of your connections watched a given match of yours, purely so a stale watch can be cleaned up automatically. It's never shown as a named list to you, your opponent, or anyone else — see the Privacy Policy for exactly how long it's kept.