If you’re a serious football fan, you're probably planning to put a year’s worth of bragging rights (and at least some of your hard-earned cash) on the line this season in an NFL or college football pool. In this post, we're going to explore three strategy angles that will give you a much better chance to win your football pick ’em pool, confidence pool, or NFL survivor pool.
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NFL Picks Advice: Survivor Pool and Pick 'em strategy
Maximizing your odds to win an NFL pool is far more complicated than just figuring out the most likely teams to win each week.
In some ways, the nature of NFL pools is similar to fantasy football. Just as in season-long fantasy, in pools you compete against other people and not against a “house” like in traditional sports betting. Also as in fantasy, your goal in football pools is simply to beat all of your opponents. That leads to a core principle behind a winning football pool strategy: It doesn’t matter how good you are picking winners as long as you pick more winners than all (or almost all) of your opponents.
It Doesn't Always Take A Great Score To Win A Football Pool
In traditional sports betting, the payout calculus is simple -- if you don't win at least 52.4 percent of your point spread bets (assuming the typical -110 payout odds), then you lose money. If you bet all 16 games of NFL Week 1 and only pick eight winners, you're in the red.
In football pools, though, that's not the case. If a bunch of crazy upsets happen in NFL Week 1 and you only get eight of 16 picks correct in your pick 'em contest, you can still end up with the best score of the week and win a prize. You just need your next-best opponent to only get seven picks correct.
These types of outcomes happen all the time in football pools, and the possibility to achieve them makes football pool strategy dynamic and complex.
Tips for getting a proven edge in football pools
Since 2000, we’ve been studying the dynamics of sports pools. In 2005, after realizing that optimal pool pick strategy required a much deeper level of analysis than scratch-pad math or even Excel spreadsheets, we started building technology to identify and exploit the inefficiencies in popular types of pools.
Based on that technology, we engineered two products to help people win more football pools: Football Pick 'em Pool Picks and NFL Survivor Picks.
So far, the results have been very strong. As a group, TeamRankings subscribers have crushed expectations for how an average player should expect to fare in football pools. Just last year, for example:
- 80 percent of Football Pick 'em Picks subscribers reported winning a season-long or a weekly prize (see all pick 'em performance data)
- Over 20 percent of NFL Survivor Picks subscribers reported over $1 million in survivor pool winnings
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3 Secrets Of The Football Pool Pros
If we had to sum up all of the research we've done into how to win football pools in two words, they would be the following: Context matters.
It doesn't take a genius to recognize that how likely an NFL team is to win a game (or to cover a point spread) is critical information for playing in football pools. Making accurate NFL predictions is effectively the cover charge for entry into the sharp pool players club.
But if you want a seat at the VIP booth, your pick strategy needs to incorporate much more than just good predictions.
Here are some examples of what we mean. If you’re not considering the three factors below when you make your NFL pick 'em and survivor pool picks this year, then you are almost certainly not making the best possible picks.
1. The Number Of Entries In Your Pool
The more entries there are in your pool, the more likely it is that one (or a few) players get very lucky with their picks this year. Maybe they pick mostly favorites and a few upsets in a pick 'em contest, then get lucky and nail most of their upset picks. Maybe three of the survivor picks they make over the course of the year end up winning in overtime.
You still need to beat these lucky players in order to win.
Big Football Pools
As a result, if you pick too conservatively in a large pool, you’re going to lower your odds of winning a prize. You may end up with a solid score that puts you in the top 10 percent of the final standings, but it's a mirage; you never actually had a fighting chance to win the thing.
In short, you need to take some risks in large pools. In almost all years, that strategy won't deliver, but so what? Your most likely outcome in the first place, by far, was not winning the pool. Even the best pick strategy in the world is only going to win a big pool once in a great while.
Still, that doesn't mean it's not worth it to play in big pools. Winning a huge pool once every 20 or 25 years could still generate an amazing return on your overall investment in pool entry fees. You just need to be committed to playing for the long term and sticking to a sound strategy.
Smaller Football Pools
On the other hand, in a small pool, it could easily be the case that no player gets super lucky this year. So, if you pick too aggressively in a small pool, your odds to win a prize can plummet.
You may think that you "need" to make one or two bold upset calls every week to differentiate your picks from your opponents, but in a smaller pool, that approach is usually the kiss of death.
Sometimes, the math clearly demonstrates that picking all the favorites is the decision that maximizes your expected pool winnings.
In the end, the trick is figuring out what level of aggressive vs. conservative pick making makes the most sense for your particular pool size. Unfortunately, there's no simple rule of thumb. In order to figure it out, we had to build software that simulates millions of football pools, and we tested how various combinations of picks fared in pools of different sizes.
2. Your Pool’s Rules And Scoring System
It goes without saying that you should know all the rules of your pool. Nevertheless, few NFL pool players appreciate just how significantly their pool's rules or format should impact their week-to-week pick decisions.
For example, one of the most popular rule variations in NFL survivor pools forces entries that are still alive later in the season (say, in Week 10) to start picking two teams per week instead of just one. Both teams must win their games in order for the entry to survive to the next week.
Very few survivor pool players realize that one rule twist has a significant effect on how they should approach making picks in earlier weeks by placing a greater value on saving better teams for later use. If your approach to a survivor pool with double picks in later weeks is simply to say, "I'll deal with that if and when I make it to Week 10; first priority is to survive until then," then you're giving an edge to sharper players.
Likewise, if your NFL pick 'em pool offers big rewards for picking upsets, take the time to fully understand the scoring implications. It may turn out that making lots of risky picks and only getting a couple of them right would still be expected to generate a higher score than picking a mix of favorites and underdogs.
3. Your Pool’s Prize Structure
A pool’s payout structure is a third factor you need to think about when you make your picks each week.
For example, assume you're playing in a 200-entry NFL pick ’em pool and the prize structure is winner-take-all. You’re in fourth place with two weeks to go. In that scenario, you probably have no chance of catching the leader and cashing in the pool unless you start aggressively picking unpopular teams and upsets and hope for the best.
The most likely outcome of that strategy? You drop like a rock in the standings, maybe not even finishing in the top 50 by the end. But it's still the right decision -- and here's why.
Some Chance Is Better Than No Chance
Picking very aggressively over the last two weeks is probably your only chance to win something from this pool. If you assume the pool leader is going to act rationally, then they are going to close out the pool picking mostly favorites (or all favorites) since that strategy gives them the best chance to defend their lead.
So, the leader will be picking favorites, and you have literally zero chance of catching the leader unless you pick the opposite way on multiple picks and hope for enough luck to make up a four-point deficit in two weeks.
Most players don't understand this concept. They may be in a position where they have some chance of placing in the money toward the end of a pool, even if it's just a slim chance, but they squander that opportunity by picking too conservatively over the final weeks.
Final thoughts on how to win your NFL picks pool
The three strategy factors we covered in this post are examples of what it takes to get an edge in football pools. Most players aren't thinking about them or don't appreciate their importance as much as they should.
If you can effectively incorporate them into your pick decisions, you will win football pools more often. Or, if you'd prefer to outsource all the necessary math and data gathering to the experts, you can subscribe to TeamRankings, and we'll apply all of these advanced strategies to customized picks for your NFL pick’em contests and picks for your NFL survivor pools. And you can try both of them out by registering for our FREE trial through NFL Week 1.
Whether you go it on your own or put the football pool pros in your corner, good luck this year in your football pick 'em contests and NFL survivor pools, and we hope you learned something from this article. It takes both luck and skill to win a football pool, but the more skill you have, the less luck you need.
For a limited time, TeamRankings is offering Sporting News readers a FREE trial of all football pool picks and betting picks through NFL Week 1. Click the link below to sign up.
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