In this post, we'll review four NFL survivor pool strategy tips that will increase your odds of being the last entry standing. The 2023 NFL season promises to be an exciting one, and for those who play in survivor pools, one with plenty of challenges. The good news is that those with the skills to break down those challenges can profit.
NFL survivor pools are high-risk ventures where just getting through the first month is difficult. In fact, in each of the past 10 years, at least half of survivor pool entries nationwide have been eliminated by the end of Week 4. But while every survivor pick is risky, there is a strategy for making picks that greatly improves your chance to actually win a contest, which is the ultimate goal. Our subscribers prove it.
Note: This analysis is brought to you by PoolGenius, the only site that provides customized pick advice that maximizes your edge in survivor pools. Since 2017, PoolGenius subscribers have reported over $5.7 million in survivor pool winnings using their NFL Survivor Picks.
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NFL Survivor Pool Strategy 2023: Tips, advice for making the best picks
1. You can't always play it safe in an NFL survivor pool
Lots of survivor players just try to pick the team that's most likely to win, especially in the early weeks. Unfortunately, giving yourself the best chance to survive a single week can sometimes be a bad decision. Ironically, that strategy can actually reduce your odds of winning a survivor pool because it often entails picking a team that many of your opponents also pick.
To understand optimal survivor strategy, you must recognize that a survivor pool is a zero-sum game. You can only beat an opponent if (a) you pick a different team than they do, (b) your pick wins, and (c) their pick loses.
As a result, a pick strategy that maximizes your chance to survive the opening weeks can provide only a mirage of success because surviving the opening weeks is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to win the pool, and to do that, you need to be the last entry standing. Even in smaller pools, achieving that goal often requires you to go deep into the season.
If you start automatically taking the safest pick each week, you will probably run out of good teams to pick later in the year and be at a big disadvantage to players who saved some good teams and still survived early. In addition, you may miss a stellar opportunity to pick against the crowd in the early weeks and survive while many entries get eliminated.
Smart survivor pool players know that you have to be willing to take some risks earlier in the season to set up a strong endgame. That strategy can increase your odds of getting eliminated early, but it also gives you a better chance to eventually win the pool.
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2. Your Survivor Picks Should Balance Safety and Value
The perfect survivor pick has three defining features:
- It's highly likely to win
- It's an unpopular pick for other entries in your pool
- It looks useless as a potential survivor pick in future weeks
Good luck finding a survivor pick like that in the real world because conflicts abound. First, the teams most likely to win each week are usually some of the best teams in the NFL and also the most likely teams to be big favorites in future weeks.
Second, teams with the highest win odds are usually very popular picks because everyone wants to pick a winner.
Finally, if a team is mediocre and doesn’t have much value as a potential future pick but just so happens to have a particularly juicy matchup in the current week (e.g. at home against the worst team in the NFL), that team should also be a very popular pick.
As a result, your calculus for making weekly survivor picks needs to evaluate the balance between these three key factors (safety, pick popularity, and future value) for every team. We explore this topic in much more detail in our free Survivor Pool Strategy book.
While it’s hard to find all three of these factors in one potential pick, the closest cases usually come when a big favorite has already been picked by lots of your opponents (but not you), it's later in the year, and your opponents only have much riskier picks as options.
For example, if you still had the Chiefs available in Week 16 last year when they were the biggest favorite of the week, you had a huge edge over entries that were taking Tennessee (as only a three-point favorite at Houston) out of necessity.
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3. Pick popularity matters, so pay attention to it
The number of entries picking a specific team greatly influences the optimal survivor pick strategy. When beating an opponent requires picking a different team than they do, anticipating how your opponents are likely to act is the first step in getting an edge.
Imagine that you play a simple game in Week 1 of 2023 with 99 other people. There's a $100 prize, and all you need to do to win it is correctly pick the winner of Buccaneers at Vikings. If multiple people pick the winner, they all get put into a tiebreaker raffle to win the $100 prize.
Looking at betting odds, you see that the Vikings have about a 70-percent chance of beating the Bucs. So, the Vikings are clearly the better pick in a vacuum. However, what happens if you talk to your 99 opponents and find out that 90 of them plan to pick the Vikings?
In that case, picking the underdog Bucs will maximize your expected winnings from the game. Your pick will only win 30 percent of the time, but it will still give you a much higher chance of winning the $100 prize since you'll only be in a tiebreaker raffle against nine other opponents as opposed to 90. In fact, picking underdog Bucs gives you over four times the expected winnings of picking the Vikings, on average.
That simplified example illustrates why you need to consider pick popularity to make profit-maximizing picks in survivor pools. More specifically, you need to understand the Expected Value (or "EV") of every possible pick. EV is a calculation that considers both risk (how likely a team is to win) and reward (the benefit to you if you avoid picking a team that loses).
You can't measure the reward side of that equation without estimating how many entries in your pool are likely to pick each team in a particular week. That's why we gather national pick popularity data from multiple survivor pool hosting sites in our NFL Survivor Picks product.
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4. It pays to make contrarian picks (but not always)
If a large number of entries in your NFL survivor pool are picking the same team as you, it reduces your EV. In that scenario, either you and lots of your opponents will all survive together (in which case you haven't gained much benefit), or you will all be eliminated together.
Still, there's no hard rule about when you should avoid very popular picks. In some weeks, the most popular pick is still your best option. (For example, maybe it's the last opportunity to take a team that will be useless as a survivor pick after the current week.) In other weeks, picking a less popular team instead of a popular big favorite may provide a far higher EV.
In recent years, some major upsets resulted in large chunks of survivor pools being wiped out when very popular picks lost. Many players that ended up winning pools avoided picking those teams, and benefited greatly from the upsets.
- 2022: In Week 3, 25 percent of the public thought they knew better than Vegas and took the Chiefs at Indianapolis and lost, even though Kansas City wasn’t one of the biggest favorites of the week. Four weeks later, another 25 percent of survivor entries were knocked out when picked New England against the Bears in an "obvious" spot.
- 2021: Starting with the Jets beating the Bengals (who had 46-percent pick popularity) in Week 8, the most popular survivor pick of the week lost for an incredible six straight weeks. On average, upsets wiped out 50 percent of still-surviving entries each week over that period.
- 2020: Around 29 percent of the public was eliminated when Dallas beat Minnesota in Week 11, then another 24 percent were eliminated when the Jets beat the Rams in Week 15.
- 2019: Over 80 percent of all remaining entries were eliminated when the Saints and Colts both lost in Week 10.
- 2018: A Saints loss in Week 1 knocked out 30 percent of the public, and 58 percent of remaining entries were eliminated two weeks later when Buffalo upset Minnesota.
Great contrarian pick opportunities don't pop up every week, so the sharpest survivor pool players use data to understand when it makes more sense to fade or follow the crowd. Our customized survivor pick rankings take all of the necessary factors into account.
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5. Adjust your pick strategy for your pool's rules and size
In addition to pick popularity and EV, other strategy considerations factor into making the best survivor pick each week. The most important thing to recognize is that there is no universal "best pick" for all types of survivor pools. Optimal strategy depends on your pool's size, rules, and other circumstances too.
For example, one popular variation of survivor pools involves the use of strikes. A strike allows you to get a pick wrong but still stay alive in the contest. These types of survivor pools should last longer (since entries stay alive after their first loss) and ultimately should require more picks. So, you have to be prepared to take more risks, expecting that you will need to use more teams than you would under typical survivor rules to eventually win.
Furthermore, your relative positioning in a strike pool should dictate how you play as the season progresses. Picking a more popular team can make more sense if you haven’t used up your strike yet, but most of your opponents have. If the pick loses, a bunch of your opponents will be outright eliminated while you simply take your strike and soldier on.
However, if you have used up your strike but most of your opponents haven't, the opposite strategy applies. Even more so than usual, you need to avoid popular teams because you cannot make up ground on entries that still have a strike if you pick the same team as they do.
Pool size impacts strategy because the bigger your pool is, the more entries you need to beat and the longer the pool is expected to last. So, in larger survivor pools, you generally need to take more calculated risks to differentiate your picks from the masses. There's also more strategic value in saving good teams to use in the future rather than burning them early.
On the other hand, smaller survivor pools may not even last until Week 13 or 14, so planning for the final weeks of the season becomes less important. For example, last year Buffalo was nearly a two-touchdown favorite in Week 4 against Pittsburgh and was also the most popular survivor pick. In a small pool, picking Buffalo that early may make sense, but in a larger pool expected to get late into the season, saving the Bills may be more valuable.
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Ready to get an edge in your 2023 NFL survivor pool?
The survivor pool strategy advice we covered in this post provides examples of what it takes to maximize your edge. Most survivor players either don't think about all these considerations or don't understand how to apply them. If you can incorporate this level of strategy into your pick making process, you will win NFL survivor pools much more often in the long run.
The hard part is that the level of analysis required for optimal strategy takes a lot of data, math, and time. That's why we built our NFL Survivor Picks product.
Among other features, the product:
- Customizes survivor pick recommendations for your pool's size and rules
- Takes into account the teams you’ve already picked with each entry
- Optimizes picks for multiple pools and entries (up to 30 picks/week)
- Incorporates the latest betting odds and objective predictions
- Compiles pick popularity data from multiple survivor pool hosting sites
- Projects current and future week survivor pick popularity for all teams
- Calculates current week Expected Value (EV) and future value for all teams
- Offers a Season Planner tool to help you plan future week picks
- Shows the future pick path that maximizes your odds of going 18-0
- Updates all data multiple times per day, so you don't miss an opportunity
Thanks to our friends at Sporting News, you can also get a free trial offer and exclusive season discounts using the links below.
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