2024 NFL Survivor Pool Strategy Guide: Proven Tips To Make Smarter Picks

This is a guest post from the experts at PoolGenius on NFL survivor pool strategy. PoolGenius subscribers have reported winning more than $6 million in survivor pool prizes using their NFL Survivor Picks product.

At PoolGenius, we love NFL survivor pools (also known as eliminator, knockout, or last-man standing pools). The concept seems so simple at first: just pick one NFL team per week, and if they win, you get to do it again the next week.

Yet one curveball changes everything: you can only pick a specific team once per season. That single constraint transforms NFL survivor pools into complex strategic games.

nfl survivor pool strategy Overview

In most NFL survivor pools, you can’t repeatedly pick the best team or even the biggest favorite each week. In order to maximize your odds of winning a pool in 2024, you will need to craft the best sequence of picks across multiple weeks, perhaps as many as 18 of them, while facing considerable uncertainty regarding how the season will play out.

The good news is that complicated games and high levels of uncertainty disproportionately favor skilled players. If you understand the core principles of survivor pool strategy, and you have the analytical chops to assess the risks and potential rewards of every possible pick, you can double or even triple your odds to win.

In this survivor strategy pool guide, we will first summarize what it takes to establish a long-term edge in these pools, then share some insights about the 2024 NFL season that survivor players should know. Finally, we’ll provide a quick overview of survivor pool tools we offer at PoolGenius.

At the most basic level, the foundation of winning survivor pool strategy is data. At a minimum, the sharpest players evaluate three factors before they make any pick decision:

• Safety: How likely is this pick to win, compared to my other options this week?
• Popularity: What percentage of my opponents will also make this pick?
• Future Value: What am I giving up if I don’t save this pick for future use?

Let’s start by reviewing how these data factors all weigh into survivor pick analysis.

Evaluate Risk vs. Reward Using Expected Value

In any given week, a team’s safety (quantitatively expressed as win odds or the percentage chance it has to win its game) and its pick popularity (i.e., the percentage of entries in your survivor pool that you expect to pick that team) need to be evaluated in tandem. A natural tension typically exists between safety and pick popularity because teams with higher win odds (a positive) tend to be more popular picks (usually a negative), and vice versa.

Enter one more metric for evaluating survivor pool picks: Expected Value, or “EV” for short. EV is a single number that quantifies the potential costs and benefits of picking a particular team. Put another way, EV is a precise and easy way to compare the overall quality of different possible survivor picks in a particular week. The higher the EV, the better.

The math behind EV considers the odds of every possible outcome in the current week:

• Sometimes, your survivor pick wins, but your expected winnings don’t increase by very much because nearly all of your opponents’ picks also win.
• Other times, you strike gold when your pick wins and several popular picks you avoided that week all lose, and your expected pool winnings skyrocket.
• Many potential outcomes exist between these two extremes.

More specifically, EV is calculating how much your expected winnings from your survivor pool increase or decrease if you pick a particular team, based on the profiles of all the other pick options that same week. A team with an EV above 1.00 means that your expected winnings will increase by picking them; EV below 1.00 means they will decrease, which is not good.

• Related: NFL Survivor Week 1 Picks

Craft A Future Pick Strategy From The Start

Since EV only considers the current week, one more factor plays a crucial role in strategy: Future Value. In short, to give yourself the biggest edge to win a survivor pool, you want to maximize the total EV of all the picks you need to make until your pool ends, and not just your EV in any one week.

Maximizing EV across the total number of weeks that your pool is expected to last (which might be around 8-12 weeks for smaller survivor pools but the full 18 weeks for larger ones) will typically require you to resist the temptation to use all the best teams early. There are two primary reasons why:

• Surviving the early weeks while burning all or most of the best teams to do so is usually just a mirage of success. If you’re most likely going to have to survive 12, 15, or the full 18 weeks to win your pool, it’s foolish not to plan for that likelihood from the start, and then find yourself at a huge disadvantage to other players down the stretch.
  
• Top teams will be positive-EV picks in lots of different weeks, even if they are very popular picks, usually on account of having high win odds relative to other pick options. However, projecting in advance the weeks in which good teams will be amazing value picks, rather than merely good ones, is what gives you the biggest edge.

Consider More Than Just Future Cupcake Matchups

When thinking about future pick planning, the most common mistake that unskilled players make is to only consider future week win odds (i.e., how many juicy matchups a team has left). For the purposes of creating edge, a team’s expected future pick popularity matters just as much, if not more. For example, if you base a big part of your season pick strategy around saving a particularly great team for Week 11 and get lucky enough to survive that long only to discover that 55% of your opponents were thinking the same thing—well, the joke is on you.

Future Value (FV) is a metric we calculate that boils down to the overall value of saving a team for later use into a single number. It not only takes into account both projected win odds and pick popularity for every team in every future week, but it also considers how much longer your survivor pool is expected to last. That estimate is critical because in a smaller pool expected to end before Week 12 or Week 13, saving a team only because it projects as an extremely high EV pick in Week 15 is probably not the best move. In a big pool, it probably is the best move.

With both EV and FV in hand, you can craft a season-long pick plan that gives you a big leg up on opponents who aren’t thinking anywhere near that level. It will probably require adjustments over time as the randomness of every NFL season rears its ugly head, and a few teams end up defying preseason expectations in a significant way. However, planning ahead while expecting some changes is still a far better strategy than only focusing on the current week.

Adjust Strategy Based On The Details Of Your Pool

In the last section, we touched upon one last element of survivor pool strategy that deserves more focus. The characteristics of each survivor pool you enter should always influence your approach to making picks. Some examples include:

• Pool size: The greater the number of entries in a survivor pool, the longer it is expected to last. As pool size increases, Future Value becomes more important.
  
• Strikes or rebuys: Some pools allow an entry to be revived by buying back into the pool after a loss; other pools base elimination on an entry’s second losing pick instead of the first (commonly known as a strike or mulligan). These types of pools are also expected to last longer than standard-rule pools of the same size.
  
• Double-pick weeks: Many survivor pools feature weeks in which players need to make not one but two picks, and both picks need to win in order to survive. The risk of elimination rises dramatically in double-pick weeks, and careful advance planning for them is required.

2024 NFL Survivor Pool Strategy: Lookahead Analysis

Now that we’ve explained the data and concepts that play into maximizing your edge in NFL survivor pools, let’s do a high level analysis of some strategy considerations for 2024.

Understanding which teams are most likely to be the NFL’s top contenders this year is the most obvious starting point. No preseason predictions are perfect, but the betting markets often provide the most reliable information. Based on Super Bowl champion futures odds at leading US-based sportsbooks, here is how things generally look before the regular season starts:

• Tier 1: Chiefs, 49ers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, last season’s Super Bowl opponents have similarly implied Super Bowl win odds that are a step above any other team.
• Tier 2: Ravens, Lions, Eagles, Bengals, Texans. Below the Chiefs and 49ers, there is a relatively large tier of teams that are all fairly close to one another.
• Tier 3: Bills, Packers, Cowboys, Jets. These teams aren’t that far behind several of the teams in Tier 2 and are also favorites to reach the postseason.

If things play out as expected, the top teams listed above will be the most valuable weapons in your survivor pick arsenal in 2024, but looking at specific weekly matchups reveals an additional, somewhat surprising insight.

Based on preseason projections, in 13 of the first 17 weeks of the 2024 season, the most likely team to win hails from a group of just four teams: Kansas City, San Francisco, Baltimore (the top three teams by Super Bowl futures odds, so no surprises so far), and Cincinnati. Choosing when to use those four teams will be critical, and the decisions begin immediately, with the Bengals (vs. the Patriots) being the largest favorite of Week 1.

As it turns out, maximizing your odds to survive the early season in 2024 may require picking all four of these teams over the first five weeks of the season. Based on projected win odds as of the preseason, we estimate that the following pick path will give you the highest rate of surviving the first five weeks:

• Week 1: Cincinnati (vs. New England)
• Week 2: Baltimore (vs. Las Vegas)
• Week 3: NY Jets (vs. New England)
• Week 4: San Francisco (vs. New England)
• Week 5: Kansas City (vs. New Orleans)

However, that is not the pick path that will give you the best chance of surviving until November and beyond. Based on our research into how long to expect survivor pools to last, even a tiny pool with 10 starting entries shouldn’t end, on average, until about the middle of the NFL season, though it could end earlier.

Once you get to a pool with 50 starting entries, and assuming no rules twists, you might get some years where a pool ends by the middle of the season, but the average expectation should be around Week 14. When you hit 1,000 entries or more, unless a pool has a feature like double-pick weeks, you should almost always be prepared to have to survive the full season.

So in the vast majority of survivor pools, deciding to use the four top Future Value teams early in the season will probably be a negative-EV move in 2024.

Week 9, in particular, looks like a potential choke point this year, where (again, based on preseason data) the only teams projected to have greater than 65% win odds are the Ravens, Bengals, and Chiefs, and the alternatives don’t look great. 

Less skilled players may have burned all three of those top teams by Week 9, potentially opening up a very high-EV pick opportunity if you save one or more of them until then.

Customized Picks For Your 2024 Survivor Pool

We hope this article helped shed some light on NFL survivor pool strategy. If there are two takeaways that you should not forget, they are that no one-size-fits-all approach applies to making the best picks, and understanding how to use smart and objective data is key.

Regarding the first takeaway, once the 2024 NFL season starts, there will be a million articles on the web promising you the top survivor pick of the week. Take all of that advice with a big grain of salt, since it has no context about your pool’s size, rules, the teams each of your entries has picked so far, or other factors that impact EV and FV for every pick option.

Regarding the second takeaway, leveraging data in the most intelligent way is indeed a challenge, even for serious and highly motivated players. Doing the smartest possible survivor pick analysis requires a lot of information, a high degree of quantitative skill, and a lot of time. Not many people have all three of those things.

NFL Survivor Picks by PoolGenius provides a solution. Whether you’re brand new to survivor pools or an experienced player, it puts the most sophisticated data and analysis at your fingertips. At the click of a button, it generates weekly survivor pick recommendations customized for your pool. Last but not least, it also includes a suite of interactive analysis tools, such as a Season Planner and EV Calculator, to help you maximize your edge. 

Thanks to our friends at The Lines, you can also take advantage of exclusive season discounts and a free trial offer by using the links below. Good luck in your NFL survivor pool strategy this year!

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