August 21, 2014 - by Tom Federico
Here’s a quick rundown on upgrades we made to our NFL Survivor Pool picks product this summer.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting what happened to us in survivor last season. After ripping off a 29-week survivor win streak across the two previous two seasons, we hit a bit of rough patch during the first few weeks of 2013. This was especially frustrating for two reasons:
When the dust settled, last year was a good reminder of how thin the margin of error can be in survivor contests. If you’re serious about winning a prize in a survivor pool, you’re taking a huge risk by only playing one entry, or even two entries in bigger contests. Given the parity of the NFL, every week even the best survivor analysis in the world has to settle on a pick that will have around a 1 in 5 chance (sometimes better, often times worse) of losing.
Second, following optimal survivor strategy is not for the faint of heart. Objective research (ours included) clearly demonstrates that your best strategy for winning a survivor pool is often to avoid picking the “crowd favorite,” even if it means picking a team that is less likely to win — especially in early weeks.
Sometimes those risks don’t play out, and as a result, you can get knocked out early. But getting knocked out early some years doesn’t mean you’re not playing intelligently. In the long run, you’ll still win survivor pools much more often than your opponents if you follow optimal strategy, even if you tend to get knocked out earlier than most when you don’t win them.
So if you’re thinking of buying our survivor advice this year, just remember that the goal of our analysis will always be to maximize your odds of winning your pool, not to maximize your odds of just surviving the first X number of weeks. Those are often very different goals. We do not shy away from taking calculated risks that are proven to increase your expected profits from survivor pools in the long run.
On that note, we’re locked and reloaded for another thrilling survivor season, with our very own Survivor guru David Hess at the helm, of course.
The feedback from our users, and our own team to boot, was that the first version of our NFL Survivor Pools product last year was a bit too cumbersome. We went from doing a simple weekly blog post with a pick at the end (two years ago), to releasing algorithmic picks for many different survivor pool scenarios, plus a bunch of new data pages and analysis tools.
It was quite sophisticated, but a bit overwhelming for some customers.
So unlike with our Football Pick’em Pools product, we didn’t spend a lot of time this summer adding features to our Survivor product. In fact, we spent more time ripping stuff out, reducing complexity, and focusing on a few big analytical improvements. To hit the highlights, we:
In summary, the theme of this summer’s Survivor work was to continue to improve the analytics powering the product, while going “back to basics” a bit with the interface. We will still have the analysis tools that our users enjoyed last year, including the Season Planner tool, Optimal Path tool, and customizable Expected Value Calculator.
If you want to get our 2014 NFL Survivor Pool picks and tools, here’s the signup page.
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