In this post, we explain the optimal pick strategy for football pick 'em and confidence pools in 2023. This advice will help give you the best chance to win both NFL and college football pools, regardless of whether they are weekly or season-long contests.
You may play in a small office pool picking the winners each week or a big-money handicapping contest in Las Vegas like the 2023 Circa Millions. Whatever the case, there is an optimal strategy for your pick 'em pool that will help you defy the odds and over the long term, win more prizes than you should based on luck alone.
This analysis is brought to you by PoolGenius, the only site that provides customized picks that maximize your edge in football picks contests. Since 2017, subscribers to Football Pick 'em Picks and NFL Survivor Picks from PoolGenius have reported winning over $6 million in football pools. They also offer NFL betting picks, and Sporting News readers can get a free trial.
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NFL Picks Advice 2023: Tips, advice for pick 'em pools
To give yourself the best chance to win a football picks pool, you need to go beyond simply forecasting winners. As crazy as it may sound, the optimal strategy isn't always to pick the team that you think has the better chance to win a game.
On the other end of the spectrum, the best strategy (in season-long pick 'em pools, at least) is rarely to pick a bunch of upsets or long shots that no one else is picking. That's almost certain to be too risky.
Rather, the ultimate goal is to maximize your chance to score more points than the rest of your opponents do. For instance, only picking eight out of 16 NFL games correctly in a week may not seem like a good performance, but you'll still win the week if no other entry in your pool gets at least eight picks right.
Doing so requires you to analyze more than just the matchups. You also need to consider information about your pool and your opponents when you make your picks, and you need to be ready to take calculated risks when the numbers say they make sense. The value of this strategy has been proven by our subscribers, who have won season-long football pick 'em pools more than four times as often as expected.
MORE: Survivor pool strategy advice
Four proven tips For winning football picks pools in 2023
1. Know your pick 'em pool’s rules and scoring system
Few NFL pick 'em players understand how much their pool's rules should impact their pick decisions. If your pool offers big rewards for picking upsets, for example, take the time to fully understand how that impacts scoring. It may turn out that making a decently high number of risky picks and only getting a couple of them right would still result in more points than picking a more balanced mix of favorites and underdogs.
Rule variations, such as whether games are picked against the spread vs. straight up or whether confidence points are used, also call for different approaches to pick strategy. In football confidence pools, for instance, it often makes sense to concentrate your risk by giving high confidence points to one or two unpopular picks, such as an undervalued favorite or an out-of-favor underdog that actually has close to a 50/50 shot to win.
2. Understand how many entries you have to beat
The more entries in your pick 'em pool, the more likely that a few players get very lucky with their picks in 2023. Typically, this happens by having very good fortune picking toss-up games and with upset picks. That's a challenge because you still need to beat lucky players in order to win.
Big Football Pools
In large pick 'em pools, it's critical to start with the understanding that your odds of winning are very low. Beating five hundred (or five thousand) other entries is not something that you should expect to happen even once in your lifetime, and even the best pick strategy in the world is only going to win once in a great while.
In that context, it certainly doesn't make sense to play it safe. To maximize your odds of tasting glory at least once in big pools, you generally need to take a more boom-or-bust approach. That means taking a good number of risks on unpopular picks to differentiate your picks from the crowd and hoping that most hit. In most years, this strategy won't yield a prize and may even lead to a finish in the bottom half of the pool. But so what? From the beginning, your odds of winning were tiny.
Being too conservative in a large football pool lowers your odds of winning a prize. You may end up with a solid score that consistently puts you in the top 20 percent of the final standings, but that performance is deceptive. You probably never had a realistic chance to win the thing.
Smaller Football Pools
On the other hand, in a small football pool, no player might get particularly lucky in 2023. So, if you make a bunch of riskier picks than your opponents do, your odds to win a season prize can plummet. Many players think they need to make one or two bold upset picks every week, but in a smaller pool, that strategy can be counterproductive.
Our research shows that picking all favorites in a small pool, especially early in the season, is sometimes the strategy that maximizes your expected prize winnings. A bit of that logic involves game theory; your opponents might pick more upsets than they should for a small pool, so you can initially stay conservative, and play it safe while they hopefully shoot themselves in the foot.
If you are in a confidence pool, you can also achieve some valuable pick differentiation by giving more confidence points to one or two of the most unpopular picks among the week's favorites.
The trick is figuring out what the ideal combination of aggressive vs. conservative picks is for your particular pool. 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 so we could test how different strategies fared in pools of various sizes. You can see how it works at the link below.
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3. Adjust for your pick 'em contest's prize structure
A pool’s payout structure is an often overlooked factor that impacts pick strategy because you have limited time to win a prize.
Assume you're playing in a 200-entry NFL pick ’em pool in 2023 and the prize structure is winner-take-all. You’re in fifth place with three weeks to go, six or seven games behind the leader. In this scenario, unless the pool leader loses their mind and starts picking lots of upsets over the last few weeks, you have almost no chance of catching them unless you start taking some risks and picking more upsets yourself.
The most likely outcome of that strategy? You drop in the standings over the final weeks, maybe not even finishing in the top 50 by the end of Week 18. But it's still the right decision because having even a slim chance to win a prize (if a crazy upset-filled week indeed happens, which helps you and hurts the leader) is better than having virtually no chance. If the leader picks all favorites down the stretch and you do, too, it's impossible to catch them.
Many players don't understand this concept. In the final weeks of a pick 'em pool, they squander some remaining chance to win a prize by picking too conservatively down the stretch. It may look like they are "hanging in there" in the standings, but in reality, their strategy gave them almost no chance to actually win something.
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4. Pay attention to how your opponents are likely to pick
The "endgame strategy" we just described in the section above is an example of how important the concept of game theory is in football pools. Simply getting a pick right isn't necessarily cause for big celebration because if almost everyone else in your pool gets it right, too, your odds to win haven't gone up much at all. (However, one exception is if you're leading a pool with not much time left.)
On the other hand, there are often cases where you can take just a little bit of extra risk to pick a team that will be a highly unpopular pick in your pool. You'll also find cases where the public is making a trendy upset pick in a closer game, and underrating the team that is actually the favorite to win. Those cases are a win-win proposition, as sticking with the less risky pick actually provides some pick differentiation value too.
Knowing when it makes the most sense to fade the crowd is a critical part of winning football pool strategy. That's why every week we gather and publish national pick popularity estimates from multiple pool hosting sites, and that data plays a big role in the customized pick recommendations we provide to our subscribers.
Ready to get an edge in your 2023 NFL pick 'em pool?
To maximize your edge in a football picks pool, you need to consider all of the strategy factors we reviewed in this post: your pool's size and rules, its prize structure, how many weeks are left, and how your opponents are likely to make their picks. Most players won't be doing all that.
In their defense, it's not easy to do because it requires a lot of data, math, and time. That's why we built our Football Pick 'em Picks product. Among other features, it:
- Provides customized picks for unlimited football pick 'em pools
- Takes into account your pool's size, rules, and prize structure
- Covers pools that pick NFL games, college football games, or both
- Optimizes picks for both spread and game-winner-based pools
- Provides picks designed to win weekly and season-long prizes
- Recommends when to target weekly vs. season prizes
- Supports fixed point pools, confidence pools, and "Pick X" pools
- Shows the latest betting odds and objective game predictions
- Compiles pick popularity data from multiple pool hosting sites
- Updates multiple times per day with the latest data.
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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