The Case for Playing Multiple NFL Survivor Entries — And How to Do It Right

If you have the opportunity, we recommend playing more than one survivor entry. We explain some strategy with multiple entries.

by Jason Lisk - May 8, 2026

Playing a single entry in a single survivor pool is a risky, boom-or-bust activity. Even in small pools, and even with our help, your odds of winning a pool in any given year are going to be fairly low.

For example, if our strategies help you triple your odds to win a 75-person pool, that’s pretty amazing. Still, playing only one entry, you’ll only be expected to win that pool once every 25 years or so, compared to once every 75 years without the PoolGenius edge. Your long-term profits should be fantastic — but it could take a long time to realize them.

Since we cannot manipulate time (yet), the only real way to increase your chances and speed up the likelihood of getting more pool wins is to play multiple entries across different pools.

What’s A “Portfolio” Of Survivor Pool Entries?

If you are playing multiple entries in one or more survivor pools this season, and more than one of your entries is still alive, then you are creating a “portfolio” of survivor picks each week.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing one or both of the following:

• Playing multiple entries in a single pool
• Playing in multiple pools

To maximize your chance to win a prize, you need to evaluate all of your surviving survivor entries across all pools, and use one big interdependent strategy to win money.

While a small portion of our subscribers only play one entry in one pool, the majority — who tend to be serious pool players — have more than one entry in play. Some of them play 10, 20, or even more entries in pools with thousands of total entries.

As it turns out, there are some really good reasons for playing multiple entries in one or more pools. We almost always recommend it.

The Case For Multiple Entries

The concept of having a portfolio of picks is similar to diversifying with a portfolio of stocks. If you had invested in both Amazon and Toys R Us in 2010, when both were established retail names, you would have seen your Amazon investment grow more than 20 times over while Toys R Us went bankrupt in 2018. Betting all your capital on Toys R Us alone, however, you would have lost everything.

If you spread your investment over a variety of options, you’re more likely to hit on one that increases dramatically in value — and less likely to completely strike out.

From a strictly financial standpoint, a lot of people are constrained in regard to how many entries they can afford, or how many entries they are willing to buy if they are primarily just playing for fun.

Make no mistake, though — aggressively exploiting a relative edge is what pros do to get ahead. If you’re familiar with daily fantasy sports, you probably know that the world’s top earning DFS players typically enter dozens if not hundreds of entries into bigger tournaments. They employ a similar portfolio-based strategy in contests that also feature a high-risk, high-reward dynamic.

What is the Right Number of Entries in One Pool?

There’s a limit to how far you can take a portfolio strategy within a single survivor pool. Your overall expected ROI decreases a bit with each additional entry you play. That’s because you pay the same amount for each entry, but there is technically only going to be one “best” survivor pick of the week in each pool.

Further, as we covered in the Expected Value article, your own pick impacts expected value. The more picks you have in a pool — and the smaller the number of other entries remaining — the more total influence your picks have on EV.

So while there is no right or wrong answer about the number of entries, there can be diminishing returns with multiple entries in the same pool. With every entry you put in the same pool, you increase your average total expected pot share, but you decrease your expected average edge.

When considering how many entries to use in a given pool, it helps to think in terms of percentages rather than raw numbers. Having 5 entries in a 150-entry pool (3.3% of total entries) will allow for a bigger average edge per entry compared to having 5 entries in a 20-entry pool (25% of total entries).

On our Past Performance page, you will see that the edge provided by our picks has been highest with 5 entries, but has a broad peak across everything from 1 to 30 entries. That would equate to our subscribers being in pools where their entries represented roughly 1 out of every 33 to 1 out of every 50 total entries on average.

Avoid Spreading Yourself Too Thin When Using Multiple Entries

As a general rule, most survivor players focus too much on minimizing their risk of total elimination when spreading picks across multiple entries. By picking lots of different teams in the same week, you do increase your odds of having at least one entry survive — but you simultaneously increase your odds of having at least one entry get eliminated.

That’s a hefty price to pay in the already high-risk world of survivor pools. Making picks with the main goal of having your portfolio survive the current week typically isn’t the strategy that maximizes your expected profits — just as focusing only on surviving the current week generally isn’t the best strategy for single entries.

If you have more than one entry in your portfolio, we’ll usually suggest splitting your picks across multiple teams so that a single upset can’t eliminate you from all of your pools. However, if you have more than two entries, we’ll usually suggest using the same team on more than one of them. For example, a 4-entry portfolio will often be split over two teams (2 picks on each) or three teams (2 picks on one team, 1 each on two others).

A real-world illustration came in Week 5 of the 2025 NFL season, when Arizona, the Rams, the Bills, the Chiefs, and Seattle all lost on the same Sunday — five popular teams eliminated in a single week. Entries with a diversified portfolio that included Detroit or Indianapolis as a second pick survived when their Arizona or Rams entry went down. Single-entry players who had been riding popular picks had no such cushion.

More Teams Equals More Expected Losses

The more different teams you pick, the lower your chance of having all your entries survive.

Think about an extreme example — if you have a 25-entry portfolio, we would never suggest picking a different team on all of them. You’d be picking both sides of some games, and some picks would be huge underdogs.

Let’s look at a hypothetical portfolio of four entries, focusing on win odds alone. Our top four options are:

• Chargers (90%)
• Rams (82%)
• Ravens (78%)
• Chiefs (73%)

# of Teams	Picks	0	1	2	3	4	Avg # surviving
1	4 LAC	10%	0%	0%	0%	90%	3.6
2	3 LAC, 1 LAR	2%	8%	0%	16%	74%	3.5
2	2 LAC, 2 LAR	2%	0%	24%	0%	74%	3.4
3	2 LAC, 1 LAR, 1 BAL	0.4%	3%	10%	29%	58%	3.4
4	1 LAC, 1 LAR, 1 BAL, 1 KC	0.1%	2%	15%	41%	42%	3.2

The Benefits of Avoiding Elimination Get Smaller After the Second Team is Used

Using two teams instead of one across your four entries reduced your chance of total elimination from 10% to 2%. However, adding a third team only lowered it from 2% to 0.4%. Going from three teams to four only lowered it from 0.4% to 0.1%.

So diversifying to a second team is the most important step for preventing total elimination. After that, the elimination-avoidance goal sees diminishing returns.

Every additional team you use also reduces your chance of getting all entries through — from 90% with one team, to 74% with two, 58% with three, and 42% with four. Each additional team makes a larger negative difference on the chance that all entries survive than a positive one on the chance to avoid elimination.

The Dynamics of Each Week Should Determine Your Portfolio Pick Distribution

For the four-entry example above, splitting over two teams looks attractive — it brings the elimination rate from 10% down to 2% while keeping the all-4-survive rate at 74%.

But the ideal pick distribution will depend on a variety of factors from week to week:

• The types of pools your entries are still alive in
• How many of your entries are in the same pool
• The number of unique rules situations across your pools
• How win odds are distributed among potential choices

In a week featuring a candidate with 90% win odds, the distribution might be more concentrated on the top choice than in a week where the best option is under 80%. Many weeks, splitting a 4-entry portfolio across three teams makes more sense. Our portfolio pick suggestion logic tries to figure out what’s best each week for your particular situation.