NFL Survivor Pool Strategies Explained

As the NFL season draws near we are going to continue our series on one of the most fun ways a casual fan can set themselves up for a large payout: Survivor Pools. Aaron got the series started with a primer on Survivor Pools and answered some of the basic questions about how they work and how you win. In this article, I’m going to look at a few different strategies and explain how they can help you become the last one standing at the end of the season and bring home that juicy prize money.

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For the majority of this article, I’ll be referencing 4for4’s incredibly handy spreadsheet that looks at every projected spread for each week of the regular season.

One Week at a Time

This is the most basic strategy in survivor pools, and I’d be willing to bet it’s the one the majority of your pool mates are employing. Under this approach, people select the largest favorite they have available each week to try and outlast their competition. I like to call this the Dory strategy where the goal is, “Just Keep Winning.”

This might sound like a simple approach, but it is quite effective, particularly in smaller survivor pools. Office pools with only 15 or 20 entries usually don’t make it very far into the season and staying alive is the name of the game. This strategy is also pretty enticing because it allows you to use the best teams in the league early in the season without taking too many risks.

If you use this strategy in 2023 you’ll start the season with the Ravens, Eagles, Cowboys, 49ers, Bengals, Chiefs, Seahawks, and Bills in each of the first eight weeks of the season, all as 7-point favorites or more. The appeal is obvious, you get to use eight of the best teams in the league and give yourself a great chance of making it deep into the season. However, this approach has a massive flaw in that you’ll only have two more teams available the rest of the season that will be favored by more than a touchdown: the Jets and the Dolphins, and both of those games come in Week 14.

While this approach limits your year-long upside, it’s perfect for those small pools mentioned above that usually come to a conclusion right around the Week 8 mark anyway as others in the pool play a little more risky and lose early.

Fade the Public

It’s not good enough to just survive, the only way to actually win the entire pool is to survive while everyone else gets eliminated. It happens every year without fail that around Week 4 a big favorite will get upset and over 50% of your pool will be eliminated. This strategy attempts to avoid that nightmare scenario where you and the majority of the pool get eliminated in one fell swoop. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re in a 100-person pool where the buy-in is 10 dollars. In a particular week, the Chiefs are 7-point favorites which means they have roughly a 76% chance to win while the Chargers are only 6-point favorites with a roughly 70% chance to win. If you were looking to just take the most likely winner like the first strategy, and advance to the next week, then the Chiefs would be the obvious choice.

However, taking into consideration how many other people have chosen a particular team can give you a massive advantage over the rest of the pool. If you know 74 of the 100 people have chosen the Chiefs, you also selecting the Chiefs does not do you a lot of good in ultimately winning the pool. If the Chiefs win, all 75 of you will move on and your $10 entry will have a value of only $13.33 ($1,000/75).

The big advantage you can gain is by choosing the Chargers in this scenario. Let’s say the other 25 people in the pool are taking them, if you take the Chargers and they win while the Chiefs lose then you are surviving with 26 total people left rather than the 75 from before. This drastically increases your entry into the pool to $38.46 ($1,000/26) because the 74 people that took the Chiefs are eliminated.

While it’s slightly more risky in the short term not choosing the team with the best odds to win, avoiding the clear favorite and the “public” pick can put you in a better position to accomplish the long-term goal of being the last one standing.

The Long Haul

If you’re playing in a much larger pool you have to be ready to make picks deep into December and using all the best teams to start the season is not ideal. Last year I finished sixth in a pool that had over 500 entries by starting the season with the Commanders, Broncos, Bears, Packers, and Bucs in the first five weeks. Not exactly a list of juggernauts. However, this allowed me to save the best teams in the league for the stretch run before ultimately falling with the Jets in Week 17.

This strategy is somewhat of a blend of the first two and focuses on long-term viability. Because I play in such a large pool that I know will last until the end of the season, I like to start with Week 18 and work backward. This lets me identify the teams that have multiple viable weeks that may be smart to save for later in the season. I think more importantly, it lets me spot weeks that may be trickier than others thanks to numerous close games and byes. Using look-ahead lines and power ratings isn’t perfect because teams change and evolve throughout the season, but it’s the best we’ve got for planning out a survivor season.

Two tricky weeks jump out at me already: Weeks 12 and 15. Week 12 only has two games with a projected spread of five or more points. The Chiefs are 5-point favorites on the road against the Raiders and the Cowboys are 6-point favorites at home against the Commanders. Avoiding road divisional games is usually a pretty good idea so it looks like we should be saving the Cowboys for Week 12 even if they do have another enticing matchup in Week 3 against a Cardinals team that will most likely be without Kyler Murray. This will allow us to save the Cowboys for a high-leverage Week 12 game while hoping the Cardinals pull a massive upset and eliminate a large portion of the competition in Week 3.

Quick Tips

The No. 1 piece of advice I can give someone starting out in a survivor pool is to know how many people have entered the pool. That may be the most influential piece of information in deciding when I start using particular teams.

If you’re in a large pool, and the rules allow it, put in more than one entry. If you’re able to get multiple entries late into the season then it gives you a huge leg up on the competition by diversifying your selections and avoiding the big upset.

Spend a few minutes looking at the season in its entirety. If you get to Week 12 and still have the Cowboys as nearly touchdown favorites at home available you’re going to be in an excellent position as your competition has to decide between a bunch of coin-flip games.