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NFL survivor pool strategy, explained
NFL survivor pools may seem straightforward at first blush. Pick one team each week, and if your pick wins you move on. However, the common rule that you can only pick each NFL team once turns these pools into challenging and strategic games.
Many survivor pool players simply focus on picking the team most likely to win, especially in the early weeks. While that strategy might help you survive a single week, it often lowers your chance to win your pool. Understanding why is the first step in becoming a smarter player.
First, if you consistently make the least risky pick in the early going, you risk running out of strong teams to pick later in the season. That puts you at a big disadvantage against players who have saved at least some good teams. So planning intelligently for the future is key.
Second, "playing it safe" early is a popular approach, so you end up picking the same team as many of your opponents pick in the opening weeks. But in order to win a survivor pool, you need to make picks that win, while your opponents make picks that lose. As a result, you should always be looking for good opportunities to pick against the crowd—not with the crowd.
The good news is that complicated games like NFL survivor pools favor skilled players. If you understand optimal strategy, and can objectively assess the risks and rewards of each possible pick, you can double or even triple your odds to win your pool.
Let's dive deeper into what it takes to achieve that edge, by reviewing five survivor pool strategy tips for 2024.
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NFL survivor pool picks best tips
Tip 1: Analyze survivor pick popularity
Your chance to win your NFL survivor pool improves whenever you survive a week, and at least one of your opponents is eliminated. Getting more extreme, if half of your opponents all pick the same team, it means you can literally double your odds to win your survivor pool—in just one week—if you don't pick that team, and it loses.
Last year 31% of still-alive survivor pool entries nationwide lost by picking Cincinnati in Week 10, and then another 32% of entries went out with Washington in Week 11. Any survivor pool entry that avoided picking those two teams and still survived to Week 12 was suddenly in a fantastic position.
Understanding how to engineer these types of opportunities, and when it makes sense to exploit them, is what sharp survivor players do. However, it requires you to project, with reasonable accuracy, the picks that your opponents are likely to make each week. Then, you'll know when lots of your opponents are going to be highly concentrated on a specific team.
You can start by reviewing nationwide pick popularity trends on survivor pool hosting sites like Yahoo! and ESPN, and then make some adjustments based on your knowledge of your specific pool. Alternatively, our NFL Survivor Picks product gathers and updates survivor pick popularity data throughout each week.
Tip 2: Measure elimination risk using objective win odds
While avoiding popular survivor picks is often wise, there’s no absolute rule that applies. The best survivor pick always depends on multiple factors, and a team's win odds (i.e., the percentage chance that it wins its game, and doesn't knock you out of the pool) are also a key consideration.
The best way to evaluate a team's win odds is by consulting market-driven sportsbook betting odds (moneylines, in particular) and/or well respected computer predictions. However, as far as survivor pools are concerned, what's most important is to evaluate a team's win odds in a relative manner, and not just an absolute manner.
A team with a 75-80% chance to win its game seems like a solid NFL survivor pick in isolation, as that's probably one of the safer picks you'll be able to make during the season. But if two or three teams all have win odds around that level during the same week, you need to be careful about wasting a good team during a week in which it's not actually going to give you much of a relative safety edge.
On the other hand, if only one team in a given week has far higher win odds than every other team, then it may still be worth picking that team, even if it is very popular.
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Consider Dallas in Week 10 last year. Facing the Giants, the Cowboys were a very popular survivor pick that week, with 44% of still-alive survivor pool entries taking them. It can often be advantageous to avoid such a popular pick, but in this case, Dallas was also the biggest favorite of the entire season, favored by 17.5 points and with win odds over 90%.
At the same time, one of the top alternative picks available to most survivor players in Week 10, Cincinnati, was only favored by 5.5 points, and presented a far higher elimination risk. That huge increase in risk made the Cowboys an overall smart pick despite their popularity.
Tip 3: Use expected value to evaluate risk and reward
In each week of an NFL survivor pool, pick popularity and win odds need to be considered together. As one would expect, teams with higher win odds are typically more popular survivor picks, and vice versa, which creates a natural tension between risk and potential reward.
This is where Expected Value (or "EV" for short) comes into play. EV is a single number that quantifies the overall risk versus reward tradeoff for a survivor pick. It considers the odds for every outcome that could happen in a particular week, from that pick winning and most other picks also winning, to that pick winning while some other popular picks lose.
In short, choosing the pick with the highest EV maximizes your expected winnings from a survivor pool. (A pick with an EV above 1.00 is favorable, while EV below 1.00 is bad.) Although calculating EV isn’t easy, resources that do so are available online.
(For the most sophisticated approach, our NFL Survivor Picks product not only calculates EV for every team, but also adjusts each team's EV for your pool’s size and rules, which impact the math.)
As a 14.5-point favorite, the 49ers had their highest survivor pick popularity against Arizona in Week 4. Despite having around 30% pick popularity, which is high, in a typical pool San Francisco still had a solid EV of around 1.10, thanks to great win odds.
However, if you held onto the 49ers until later in the season, their EV averaged a fantastic 1.30 in four different weeks after Week 10. In those later weeks, they were also favored by double digits, but their pick popularity was much lower, since players who had already picked San Francisco in earlier weeks were forced to make far riskier selections.
As it turns out, for many players, Week 4 was not the most strategic time to pick San Francisco.
Tip 4: Map out future value to drive your season pick strategy
While focusing on EV to evaluate survivor picks is essential, it’s not enough on its own, because EV only considers one week at a time. To give yourself the best chance to win a survivor pool, you want to maximize the combined EV of all the picks you'll need to make until your pool ends.
That requires projecting win odds, pick popularity, and EV for every team in every future week. With those estimates in hand, you can boil them down into a single quantitative metric that tells you what you're sacrificing in the weeks ahead if you pick a particular team now.
We call that metric Future Value. While estimating Future Value involves a decent amount of uncertainty—since some unexpected things will always happen as the NFL season goes on—the benefits of planning ahead far outweigh the risks. Planning ahead is what enables you to set up high-EV pick opportunities in later weeks that significantly increase your odds to win.
Consider Cincinnati in 2024. At publication time, the Bengals have the highest win odds of NFL Week 1, as 8.5-point favorites over the Patriots. However, we project Cincinnati will have three other weeks during the 2024 season with win odds as high as they are in Week 1, and two additional weeks with only slightly lower win odds.
If 30% or 40% of your opponents pick Cincinnati right away, the Bengals should have higher EV as a future week pick, when they will be unavailable to a large portion of survivor players who already picked them. In fact, as of Week 1, we rate Cincinnati among the top four teams in the NFL in Future Value, so they are a key chess piece in 2024 survivor pools.
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Tip 5: Adjust pick strategy for your pool's size and rules
When making your weekly survivor picks, it's crucial to understand that no one-size-fits-all strategy applies to all pools. If one thing separates the pros from the Joes in NFL survivor pools, it's the understanding that different types of pools call for different approaches to picks.
The size of your pool (i.e., the total number of entries still alive) is one major example. Larger survivor pools with 1,000 or more entries are very likely to last the entire season. If you need to go 18-0 to win, then taking calculated risks early and saving stronger teams for later use is almost always wise. In contrast, smaller pools might be expected to end by midseason or soon after, so saving a team for a juicy Week 17 matchup would be foolish.
Going back to Cincinnati, picking the Bengals in Week 1 may actually make sense in a small pool that is unlikely to last beyond Week 10 or Week 11. However, it's more likely to be a suboptimal decision if you are probably going to need to make 18 or more picks to win.
We mention 18 "or more" picks because survivor pool rules also play into this pool-specific calculus. If you need to make double picks in some future weeks, for example, then planning ahead for those weeks is crucial, and should impact your analysis of the current week's options.
Expert Picks For Your 2024 NFL Survivor Pool
Winning an NFL survivor pool is extremely difficult, but the strategy tips discussed in this article will give you a big edge over opponents who are not operating at this level. In any single year, you will still need to get lucky to taste the spoils of a victory, but over the long term, skill prevails.
Still, one big challenge remains. Optimal survivor pool strategy requires extensive data, complicated math, and lots of time, and very few people have all three.
That's why we build our NFL Survivor Picks product. Whether you're brand new to survivor pools or an experienced player, it puts the most sophisticated data and analysis at your fingertips, and generates customized weekly pick recommendations at the click of a button. It also includes a suite of interactive analysis tools to help you maximize your edge.
Thanks to our partners at Sporting News, you can also take advantage of exclusive season discounts and a free trial offer by using the links below. Good luck in your pools this year!
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