NCAA Tournament Survivor Pool Strategy Guide

Playing in an NCAA Tournament Survivor Pool? Use our strategy tips to boost your chances of winning.

At PoolGenius, we love our survivor pools. We have written an entire strategy guide e-book on playing in NFL survivor pools and an NFL Survivor Pool Picks product for football season. Many concepts we cover for those pools also apply to NCAA Tournament survivor pool strategy. However, there are also several differences and nuances to understand, which we’ll break down in the following sections.

Getting Started With March Madness Survivor Pools

One thing to know about NCAA Tournament survivor pools is that they truly do capture the madness of March. You will be rooting for upsets–unless they involve your pick.

You can try to plan for the future, but it can change since you don’t know who will still be around in a week. And it might occasionally make sense to take outright underdogs if you have a large chunk of the pool on the other side and the relative odds favor you.

We cover the following strategies in this article:

• Wide range of survivor rules
• Planning for the near future
• Using objective win odds to assess teams
• Projecting pick popularity
• Knowing when to take heads-up risks
• Paying attention to your path

There’s a Wide Range of Survivor Pool Rules

March Madness survivor pools have grown organically, and several rule twists impact strategy. Most of these revolve around how many teams you have to pick and when. This includes:

• One pick each round
• One pick each day
• Multiple picks in a given round

Those rules can even switch in the tournament, such as a pool that requires you to pick a team each of the first four days but then goes to one pick per round thereafter.

Each of these rule variations impacts your strategy. They determine when to take risks and how much you have to plan.

So pay attention to when and how many teams you must pick.

How to Plan for the First Two Rounds

To win an NCAA survivor pool, you typically have to last deep into the tournament, often into the Final Four. That means you need to plan ahead for teams still alive deep in the tournament.

You could be in trouble if you use a national title contender early and they keep winning in the subsequent rounds.

In this way, March Madness survivor pools are much like NFL playoff survivor pools. You need to keep an eye on who is likely to advance. You can’t just make decisions based on the current value of picking a team.

Teams to Target Early

In an ideal world, the best picks would have high win odds now, not be very popular, and be unlikely to advance to the Final Four. But those are hard to find, so it often comes down to balancing at least one of those factors against the other two.

Still, you should be looking for teams with a lower chance of advancing to the Final Four than people think. One example could be a top-three seed with a good early matchup but a tough region (or a lower power rating).

You should also try to save the top five or six teams likely to advance far in the tournament to ensure you’ll have an option to use later on.

How to Find Optimal NCAA Survivor Picks

Many people try to go by their gut or what they saw in the last game, which means they may give up value. If you want to know which teams can win in the current round or advance further, you should use more objective data.

1. Look at Betting Data

One option is to use betting market data. Individual game betting markets can help you predict how likely a team is to win their next matchup. Futures markets (like odds to make the Final Four or win the title) can help you project a team’s chance to advance.

2. Use Our Advancement Odds

Another option is to use our advancement odds–on the NCAA Survivor Pool Picks page. These are created based on bracket simulations driven by our adjusted power ratings. We start with our raw power ratings and adapt based on injuries, betting market data, and research into what qualities predict NCAA Tournament success.

If you don’t know the relative difference in odds between teams, you cannot truly assess when taking a lesser team to save future value is worth the risk. You also won’t know when it’s probably worth selecting a top seed and using some future value because the public will be concentrated on a different choice.

March Madness Survivor Pick Popularity

For NFL survivor pools, we collect real-world data from several pool hosting sites to measure the popularity of various picks. That level of detailed data is unavailable for March Madness survivor pools. There’s also more variation in how many teams must be selected in each pool, so pick popularity can vary greatly.

That said, a few factors will tend to result in “popular” picks for the public. Most entries know that you must have good teams late, so top seeds often aren’t all that popular in the first and second rounds.

The popular picks tend to be based on:

• Spread
• Seed number (the worse, the better if the spread is high)
• Public perception of whether the team is a title favorite

When Does Pick Popularity Matter?

The first round tends not to have any single pick that is too popular. Even if picks are required each day, you still have 16 favorites to choose from.

However, some picks start to get popular in the second round and Sweet 16, generally the results of earlier upsets. For example, in 2021, No. 7 Florida (going against No. 15 seed Oral Roberts) and No. 11 UCLA (going against No. 14 seed Abilene Christian) were often the two most popular picks of the second round. In 2023, No. 7 Missouri facing No. 15 Princeton was extremely popular in the second round.

Avoiding those picks was a key factor in who won pools in those years.

Florida and Missouri lost outright, which is likely the single most significant elimination result in many pools. UCLA won but ended up advancing to the Final Four. Entries with UCLA available as a contrarian Elite Eight choice were likely heavily represented among pool winners.

Knowing When to Take Risks

You should rarely pick an outright underdog in an NFL regular-season survivor pool. When there are 10-16 other favorites, it seldom makes sense to go heads-up with an underdog.

That isn’t true in later rounds of a NCAA Tournament survivor pool. You’ll likely have to pick an underdog at some point in the Elite Eight, Final Four, or the national title game. You want to be set up to do so when most of the others in the pool are concentrated on the other side.

The key is to take big swings and risks to win a March Madness survivor pool, and you want to do so when it has maximum effect, such as when you can win a pool outright by being the only one on the underdog side. Generally, it would make sense if the underdog still has a respectable chance of winning outright (checking in as a 5-6 point underdog or less).

Paying Attention to Your Path

It’s essential to think about March Madness survivor pools as entire paths through the bracket rather than viewing each pick individually. Since you can only use a team once, the team you pick in a given round needs to lose soon thereafter to provide you with the best chance. If a team you have already used advances deep into the tournament, you could be without an available pick.

First and Second-Round Survivor Paths

You don’t have to be as concerned about the ultimate path as much in the first two rounds. Instead, you should look for advancement odds, weigh popularity, and consider long-term future value at this time. In other words, if you pick a No. 4 seed over a No. 13 seed in the first round, you don’t have to immediately pick against them or have them lose in the next round. You need for it to happen by the Final Four.

The Path Matters Most in the Sweet 16 and Beyond

Once you get to the Sweet 16 and the Elite Eight, your paths will be determined by who remains and whom you have used. You need to pay attention to which picks give you the chance to win it all, not just advance to the next round. That might mean playing an underdog in one round to have a better option in the next one.