Football Pool Strategy: 3 Factors The Pros Use To Win

August 30, 2017 - by Tom Federico

The best picks for your football pool depend on several factors.

Football pool strategy isn’t as simple as you may think.

Yes, luck plays a role in determining who wins a football pick’em pool, confidence pool, or NFL survivor pool. However, it’s just part of the equation. The better your strategy is, the less luck you need to win.

In this post we’re going to explore three of the primary elements of winning football pool strategy. If you want to maximize your odds to win your pool in 2017, you need to incorporate these factors into your pick decisions.

Editor’s Note: We’ve built the only system that optimizes picks for your football pool based on the key factors outlined in this post. Check out our:

Football pick’em pool picks (which are free if you try FanDuel)

NFL survivor pool picks (also free with FanDuel)

Optimal Football Pool Strategy: It’s Complicated

So what does it take to become a sharp football pool player with a huge edge over your opponents?

For starters, winning football pool strategy is much more complex than just picking the most likely teams to win.

First, you need to recognize something that seems obvious. In football pools, you compete against other people (as opposed to trying to beat a “house” as in traditional sports betting).

That means your goal is simply to beat all your opponents. It doesn’t matter how good your picks are on an absolute scale. They just need to be better than everyone else’s.

That simple fact has big implications for optimal picking strategy.

The Game Theory Aspect

Unlike fantasy football, in which you manage your own unique roster of players, football pools generally require all players to evaluate the same (or a very similar) decision set.

In pick’ems, everyone usually needs to pick the winner of each NFL game. In survivors, everyone typically picks one NFL team in a given week, and needs that team to win.

In these situations, optimal pick strategy requires you look beyond the games themselves, and also consider the picks that you expect your opponents to make. After all:

The only way you can win a pick’em pool is by getting more picks right than your opponents
The only way you can win a survivor pool is by picking a winner while your opponents pick losers
The only way either scenario can happen is if you make at least one different pick than your opponents

As a result, you will almost never maximize your odds to win a football pool without picking “against the crowd” at least to some extent.

That dynamic makes optimal pick strategy for football pools exciting, complicated and sometimes terrifying all at the same time.

Football Pool Strategy In Two Words

We’ve been studying the strategy dynamics of football pools for over a decade.

In 2005, we realized that optimal football pool strategy required a much deeper level of analysis than is possible with Excel spreadsheets. So we started building proprietary technology to exploit the inefficiencies inherent in popular pools and scoring systems.

(Our site was started by Stanford engineers, so that’s the default answer for geeks like us: “Create an algorithm!”)

We’ve built models to predict individual NFL games, to forecast entire NFL seasons, and to simulate millions of hypothetical football pools ranging from 2 entries to 20,000 entries.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve built models to project the picking tendencies of opponents in a pool like yours — all based on objective, historical data on public picking trends in football pools.

And if we distilled all of our research over the past decade plus down into one key takeaway, it would be this:

Context matters.

3 Pool Strategy Factors You Need To Evaluate

Here are three examples of pool characteristics that you must consider in order to maximize your odds to win.

If you don’t factor them into your pick making decisions in 2017, you’re almost certainly not making the best picks.

1. The Number Of Entries In Your Pool

The more entries there are in your football pool, the more likely it is that one (or a few) entries get very lucky with their picks this season.

Pick’em & Confidence Pools

In an pick’em or confidence pool, you still need to beat those entries to win, so if you play too conservatively in a large pool, you’re going to lower your odds of winning a prize. Vice versa, if you pick too many upsets in a small pool, your win odds will suffer.

Survivor Pools

In an NFL survivor pool, the total number of entries impacts how many weeks the pool is expected to last before a winner is determined. The bigger that number, the more careful you need to be about using good teams early instead of saving them for later.

2. Your Pool’s Rules And Scoring System

When it’s first and goal from the 1-yard line, and you’re down by 5 with 30 seconds left in the game, you don’t want to kick a field goal and settle for 3 points.

Yet you’d be shocked at how many football pool players make those sorts of decisions, because they don’t fully understand the implications of their pool’s rules and/or scoring system.

Pick’em & Confidence Pools

Confidence pools provide the opportunity for bigger swings in the pool standings on a week-by-week basis, compared to traditional pick’em pools where you only get 1 point for each correct pick.

That fact has major implications for how you should pick if you find yourself trailing the leader with only a few weeks left in the season, although there’s no easy rule of thumb that applies to all situations — a lot of math is required.

Survivor Pools

On the survivor pool side, one of the most popular rule variations forces surviving entries to start picking two teams per week later in the season. That rule tweak directly impacts optimal early season picking strategy, placing a greater emphasis on saving better teams for later.

3. Your Pool’s Payout Structure

Payout structures and rules come into play in different ways for pick’em pools vs. survivor pools.

Pick’em Pools

Assume your pick’em pool is winner-take-all and you’re in fourth place with two weeks to go. In that scenario, you may have no chance of catching the leader unless you start aggressively picking more unpopular teams and upsets.

(They probably won’t come through, but it’s your only chance if you assume the leader is going to play it safe and pick mostly favorites over the last couple weeks.)

However, that approach would be a terrible strategy if your pool splits the prize pool equally among the top five finishers. Aggressively picking more upsets would increase your odds of catching the current leader, but your odds of getting a bunch of picks wrong and dropping out of the money entirely also would skyrocket.

Survivor Pools

In NFL survivor pools, the tiebreaker rule for determining how a winner is determined if multiple entries survive until the end of the season is a critical dynamic to consider in weekly pick strategy.

This is especially true if a regular season tie results in the pool continuing into the playoffs, instead of splitting the pot among surviving entries. In the former case, you need to be more careful about using better teams early — especially teams expected to make the playoffs.

Ready To Become A Football Pool Pro?

The examples above provide a sample of the many things you need to consider when making football pool picks, if you want to pick like the pros do.

It’s a lot to digest, but if you’re serious about winning, the bar has been set. There may be at least one person in your football pool who understands these concepts, and is applying them to their weekly picks to get an edge.

If you don’t have the time, the will or the skill to do this level of analysis, though, fear not.

We’ve spent years building the only system that optimizes picks for your specific pool, and our customers win prizes in football pools 2-3x as often as expected. Learn more at the links below:

Football pick’em pool picks

Football confidence pool picks (same product)

NFL survivor pool picks