When Should I Get Picks For My Pool?

You are free to generate your custom picks as needed, so we discuss when the best time to get them would be.

If you have a hard deadline to submit all your picks at a certain time, you should get your picks as close as possible to your deadline. This way, your recommended picks will incorporate all of the latest information on team win odds and public picking trends that we have.

If you had already generated picks at an earlier time, that’s no problem. Just click the “Update Picks” button for your pool and go through the custom picks process again, and the system will regenerate recommended picks for you using the latest information.

Note, however, that every time you update picks, the system will overwrite the last set of picks it generated for your pool, and we do not save a history of those overwritten picks. So if you want to save a history of picks you generated previously, you’ll need to copy down the data yourself.

If you are in a pool where you can change your pick for every game up until right before kickoff for each game, you have a choice: the quick way or the thorough way.

The quick way is to just submit all your picks right before the first game kicks off, and just let them be. However, this means that any new information (mainly shifts in the betting market odds, and power ratings updates based on the results of earlier games) will not be taken into account, which could make a game or two difference over the course of the season (our final picks are generally slightly more accurate than our initial picks, due to the increased information available to our models).

The thorough way is to update your picks before each game, or each time slot. We’ll lock in the picks from earlier games, so those shouldn’t change (if they do, email us at support@teamrankings.com and we’ll investigate it). But future games can shift if there’s any new information that warrants it. For example, perhaps a line moved from favoring the home team by 1, to favoring the visiting team by 1. If our models weren’t taking a strong position on that game initially, then our win prediction would likely flip from the home team to the visiting team, due to taking this betting market information into account.