Xbox Live Sports Picks app lets you measure your prognosticating abilities

An easy way to make sports fandom more fun is to predict outcomes of games — whether for money or not — and Microsoft is capitalizing on that with a new Xbox Live app, Sports Picks, launching today.

The app applies gamification to picking the winners of sporting events, allowing users to make predictions for events like NCAA bowls, NBA games and UFC fights and accrue points for doing so. Leaderboard rankings based on those points let people measure their prognosticating abilities against others, and Xbox SmartGlass integration provides a tablet or smartphone experience so users can make predictions while watching sports on their TVs.

Microsoft is also adding SmartGlass support to the existing ESPN app, which received a major refresh last month, as well as to the NBA Game Time app. The integration will allow users to browse live events and other content on their tablets or smartphones and send them to their Xbox 360 consoles for full-screen viewing.