What’s The Best Strategy For Popular Tiebreakers In Pick’em Pools?
Many pools have tiebreakers, usually tied to scores or total points in a particular game. Here are some considerations when deciding.
Most tiebreakers for pools are based on predicting either the final score or the total points scored in a game.
It’s very difficult to do either, but a solid approach is to use recent Vegas betting odds for a game — specifically, the point spread and the over/under line — to guide your tiebreaker predictions. Vegas lines are typically good predictors and can be easily adapted for this purpose.
For example, if the current point spread (the implied margin of victory) for a game is 10 and the over/under line (the implied total points scored) is 50, then the projected final score implied by the Vegas odds is 30-20. That score equates to a margin of victory of 10 points for the favorite, with 50 total points scored in the game.
For any games where we have recent betting lines, we list the Vegas implied final score (“Vegas Score”) and the Vegas implied total points scored (“Points”, which is a sortable column) in the “Show Tiebreaker Info” view for every set of picks we show. There is a toggle at the top of every pick set detail view that lets you switch to that view.
Two explanatory notes here:
1) Because point spreads and over/under lines can be fractional (i.e. 10.5, 7.5, 43.5), both the Vegas Score and the projected total Points columns may show fractional values too. This can look a little ugly, but we’d rather show you the actual implied projection than arbitrarily change it.
2) Vegas Score and Points have no link whatsoever to our recommendation for how you should pick a particular game. Depending on your pool details and circumstances (e.g. type of pool, size of pool, your current position in a season-long weekly pool), your optimal pick for a specific game could be either the Vegas favorite or the underdog.
What to Do With Tiebreakers When an Upset is Recommended
So if we recommend you make an upset pick and choose an underdog to win a particular game, for instance, the Vegas Score is not going to “agree.” It’s still going to project the favorite to score more points than the underdog.
In such cases, we recommend doing one of two things:
- The most conservative thing to do is to still use the Vegas Score as the basis for your tiebreaker, even though it contradicts our recommended pick to win that game. Any underdog pick is a bit of a risk, so this way, even if you get the pick wrong, if your week’s score comes down to a tiebreaker you should still be well positioned.
- The higher risk / higher potential reward option would be to just flip the Vegas score to favor the underdog you are picking, effectively going “all in” on the underdog pick.
Tiebreaker Strategy and Game Theory Depends on Your Pool
Finally, there is usually a bit more strategy and game theory involved in picking the optimal tiebreaker value for your pool. We are going to explore this topic in more mathematical detail in the future, but for now here are some general thoughts.
- If you’re playing in a very small pool against people who generally aren’t very savvy about betting lines, just going with the Vegas implied value for final score or total points scored should generally be a good enough approach.
- The bigger your pool gets and the more savvy your opponents get, the more you need to assume that most of your opponents will also be using Vegas implied values (or close to them) for tiebreakers. In that case, depending on your pool’s rules for determining what constitutes the “closest” tiebreaker value to the actual game outcome, it will almost certainly raise your expected value to go at a few points or more away from the Vegas implied values, and differentiate your tiebreaker value from the crowd.
- You should also keep in mind what “football scores” are most likely to occur. If the Vegas Score for a game is listed as 25.25 to 19.75, for example, then 24-20 is a much more likely football score than 25-19.
- We have added an article on common scores for tiebreakers, if you want to see how frequently certain numbers have been hit.