Why Did My Recommended Pick For A Past Game Change?

If you generated a new set of picks but the recommendation for a game that has already been played changed, here are reasons why.

Some pools allow you to make picks for each game right up until kickoff, which means you might submit your pick for a Thursday game on Thursday, and then submit your picks for the rest of your games on the weekend. In that case, coming back to the site to update our pick recommendations can be useful, as our later recommendations can take into account new information like betting line changes, or updated team ratings and stats.

As we mention in our “Can Recommended Picks Change?” article, in most cases the newly updated picks you generate should keep the pick (and confidence points, if applicable) for any earlier game exactly where it was in your previous set of picks.

However, there are some “triggers” that cause the recommendations for games in the past to be wiped away, and an entirely new set of picks to be generated. When you use the “Get Updated Picks” function, any of the following can trigger the old pick to be discarded:

• Changing the selection of games available on the “Which games do you need to pick?” screen
• Changing the spread of a past game
• Changing the answer to “How are your pool’s confidence points structured?” or “What are the point values of your picks?”
• Changing the answer to “How many picks do you need to make?”

The reason we generate entirely new picks in these cases is that each of these could end up leading to misleading or nonsensical recommendations. (For example, if we originally suggested that you pick Team X with 15 confidence points, and now you say your pool uses confidence values of 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, then we can’t really re-use the 15-point Team X pick.)

In addition to the above triggers, if you change your pool definition, we throw out any saved picks for this week and create new suggestions. That’s simply because changing the pool rules can change the optimal strategy.

So if you see a pick change, first ask yourself if your answers to any of the above questions changed, or if you changed your pool definition. If not, then please email support@teamrankings.com to report it, as this would be a bug that we’d want to fix ASAP.