Survivor Strategy: Ground Rules

This is the first in a short preseason series on Survivor Pool Strategy. Today, we’ll go over a few basic strategy guidelines for Survivor pools. In the coming weeks, we’ll cover more advanced strategies and considerations, including how to best make use of public data, the balance between short term and long term planning, and the effect of pool size on your choices. Also, in case you missed it, yesterday we kicked off a Pick ‘Em strategy series, which will run over the next few Wednesdays. Check it out!

Also known by the less politically correct moniker “suicide pools,” Survivor pools require contestants to pick one NFL team each week. If your pick loses its game, you’re out of the contest. The catch, of course, is that you can’t pick the same team twice.

In math geek terms, these contests are fascinating optimization problems where the underlying data changes every week. Your optimal strategy likely depends on a number of factors including the teams you have left to pick, the number of contestants still alive in your contest, public opinion on the current week’s matchups, and the state of the NFL playoffs races. Fun stuff!

While each week of a Survivor contest will involve unique analysis relating to the current games and situation, here are a few guidelines that usually apply:

1) You’re in it to win it.

This is really the master rule, and all others follow from it.

Your picks should be made with the goal of maximizing your odds to win your NFL Survivor pool this season, NOT maximizing your odds to survive the current week. Sometimes that will mean choosing a team that isn’t the biggest favorite in a given week — or even the second or third biggest favorite.

It’s critical to understand that simply picking the most likely team to win each week, based on the teams still available to you, is not typically the best strategy for winning an NFL Survivor pool. There are 17 weeks in the NFL regular season, and going the distance means keeping both the short and long term in mind.

Which brings us to…

2) Plan for the future.

If you want to take home the trophy, you have to save some teams for future weeks. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is to use our NFL Survivor Predictor.

The Survivor Predictor shows every team’s chance of winning in every week of the season. The odds are a bit rough right now, since they are based heavily on last season’s power ratings, but they should still give you a good idea of which weeks have few good choices, and which are overflowing with easy picks.

For example, if you sort by the Week 9 win odds, you’ll see that it’s one of the most evenly matched weeks — only four teams (Patriots, Raiders, Packers, Jets) are currently projected to have at least a 70% chance to win that week. You would be wise to try to save a couple of those teams, so you’re not forced to gamble your season on a near coin flip halfway through.

An addendum to this rule is that if you’re faced with a decision between two teams that are favored by similar margins, it’s generally a good idea to pick the worse team. That’s because they’ll be less valuable going forward — you’d rather save the good team for future weeks.

3) Pick against the public.

Consider this: In order to beat any given Survivor opponent, there has to be one week of the season where you pick a winner and your foe picks a loser.

If everybody is picking the Packers to beat Denver at home in Week 4, making the same choice can gain you nothing. Even if you win, none of your competitors were eliminated.

On the other hand, if you choose a slightly riskier favorite (Chicago at home versus Carolina, for example), there’s a small but not insignificant chance that Green Bay will lose, Chicago will win, and you’ll be one of the few survivors.

You obviously don’t want to go crazy — don’t pick a huge dog just because “nobody else is picking them!” (Actually, there ARE a few cases where picking an underdog is justified. We’ll cover those next week.)

4) Know your pool rules.

In some pools, you’re out after one loss. In others, it takes two losses to be eliminated. Some polls run through the playoffs, while some end after the regular season. Still others have a postseason “reset,” where anybody still alive at the end competes in a brand new postseason survivor pool at the end. Some variations require you to pick a loser every week, rather than a winner. I’ve even heard of a pool where you pick TWO winners each week, and it takes two losses to knock you out.

Each of these variations can affect your weekly choices by increasing or decreasing the amount of risk you can take on, or altering the importance of saving teams for later. We’ll go into more detail in a future post, or if you have specific questions you can ask them in the comments section.

Stay Tuned

As mentioned above, these rules are just a start. We’ll be back next Thursday with more advanced strategy and advice, including math demonstrating that in extreme cases (enormous pools, with the public heavily favoring a team that’s only a very slight favorite) it can actually be in your best interest to pick an underdog.