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NFL Survivor Pool Advice and Strategy to Win Your Pool This Season

by Spencer Toth - 8/21/2025

Survivor Pool advice David Moore Carolina Panthers

Long before single-game betting became popular in the NFL, the legendary survivor pool stood alone at the top of the sports betting mountain. Survivor pools come in all shapes and sizes. You can make a casual survivor pool among your friends and family, or you can swing for the fences with a survivor pool online or with your local sportsbook. Either way, the goal remains the same. Survive the NFL season. 

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Survivor Pool Rules

The concept of survivor pools is quite simple. Take one team each week to win without duplicating picks throughout the season. If you make it to Week 18 without taking a loss, you win. While it sounds simple, stringing together 18 consecutive winners is far from an easy task. If you take the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Dallas Cowboys to open up the season, even if the Eagles win, that means you cannot select the Eagles again in any of the next 17 weeks. There are countless upsets every season in the NFL, and it takes just one bad break to bring your survivor pool to a swift conclusion. The stakes are incredibly high each week with a potential elimination on the line, which keeps things tense throughout the season.

Survivor Pool Variants

Due to the harsh nature of survivor pools, a variety of variants have popped up over the years. While these may not be a traditional survivor pool format, an early upset can quickly ruin your survivor pool, making these variations more than acceptable. 

  • Mulligan or Second Chance: This one is straightforward. If your chosen team loses in any given week, you get one mulligan or second chance to remain in the pool. One extra life can go a long way in the survivor pool format, and this is one way to ensure your smaller survivor pools will usually end up with at least one winner at the end of the season. 
  • Multiple Entries: You will only use up 18 of the 32 NFL teams throughout the season, leaving 14 teams unselected. Another popular survivor pool variant allows you to use all 32 teams to survive the season. If you are not confident in a middling favorite to win, you can opt to use two or even three teams on any given week to maximize your chances at survival. However, each team can still only be used once, even if one of your extra picks wasn’t ultimately needed that week. 
  • Loser Pool: This is a personal favorite of mine. Instead of picking a new team each week to win, you will instead pick a team to lose each week. The rules are the same; you can only pick each team once, but that team must lose to survive. All of a sudden, you are saving the Cleveland Browns and New Orleans Saints in the back pocket, and staying away from the Super Bowl contenders. This is often as hard-or even harder-to survive than the traditional survivor pool format. 

Survivor Pool Strategies

There is no shortage of survivor pool strategies, but the reality is that surviving a season is an incredibly difficult task. Even if you could miraculously find a new -400 favorite each week (which you won’t), you’d still have less than a 2% chance of surviving all 18 weeks. Following these strategies increases your chances of achieving the ultimate NFL success. 

  • Map out future weeks: Before you make a single pick in your survivor pool, you must first look at the entire schedule and get a general idea of what teams you want to take in what weeks. Let’s say the Kansas City Chiefs have an easy Week 1 matchup, but you look ahead and see they are the only heavy favorite in Week 9. You may want to take a different favorite to kick off the season, saving the Chiefs for when you need them most. This will make things much easier for you down the line, and it is important to remember that there will almost always be multiple winners in a public survivor pool. It won’t matter if you get eliminated in Week 1 or Week 18, so there is no reason to kick the can down the road with scared decision-making. 
  • Pay attention to others: The primary goal in survivor pools is to survive, but the secondary goal is to do so without anyone else surviving. If there is a massive favorite that a majority of your pool is on, it may be wise to look elsewhere for your selection. For example, if 45% of your pool selects the Eagles to beat the Cowboys in Week 1, you will gain no ground by following the herd. The Eagles will either win, and everyone advances, or they will lose, and a large chunk of your competitors will be eliminated. By mixing it up a couple of times throughout the season, you can ensure you won’t be joined by hundreds of other entrants if it happens to be a season without too many major upsets. 
  • Dealing with multiple entries: Whether they are all in the same pool or across different pools, many people elect to have multiple survivor pool entries each season. This allows you to stay engaged if you suffer an early exit, but managing these entries is another thing to consider. Try to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket when managing multiple survivor pool entries. By varying your picks each week, you can maximize your chances of having at least one entry alive in the tail end of the season. 
  • Pay attention to the betting odds: While there will always be money to be made with sports betting, the betting odds do an excellent job at evaluating each team’s chances to win on any given week. By taking a look at the current betting odds, you can get a good idea of which teams are expected to win and which may be bigger underdogs than you may think. You don’t always have to take the biggest favorite each week, but taking one of the top five favorites is usually a good strategy to follow. Unless you are in a pickle from early-season choices, there is no reason to chase a +120 underdog when there are several favorites available. 


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