Endgame Strategy: Using The EV Calculator To Further Customize Picks

When your pool only has a handful of entries left, you can use the EV Calculator tool to give yourself an extra edge to win.

The custom My Pool Picks rankings work best when there are enough people remaining in your pool that you can treat them as a herd, and not worry too much about any one player’s exact picks.

Once you get down to around 10 people left, though (or when there are so few entries remaining in your pool that you can examine the pick history for all of your remaining opponents one by one, and come up with reasonable predictions of your own for the team you think each opponent will pick), you may be able to come up with even better picks for your pool using this slightly more complicated method:

  1. Examine all the remaining opponent entries and try to predict the likely picks for each. You don’t need to come up with a single specific pick for each — you can predict something like “either Denver or Green Bay”.
  2. Using all your individual predictions, combine them into one or a few projected pick distributions for your pool. For example, if there are 2 opponents left, and you think one of them will surely pick Kansas City while the other may pick either Kansas City or Atlanta, then you’ll have two possible pick distributions: (a) 50% KC, 50% ATL or (b) 100% KC
  3. For each projected pick distribution, use the EV Calculator tool (see link in top navigation bar) to get Immediate EV values for your pick(s) this week.
  4. Examine all your possible Immediate EV values, and order teams according to how consistently high they score across all the possible scenarios.
  5. Penalize teams that are the obviously-best pick for your pool in one of the next couple weeks by bumping them down a couple spots in the current week rankings.

For example, let’s assume that in the two pick distributions listed above, the Packers are the highest Immediate EV pick in both scenarios, while either KC (in Scenario A) or ATL (in Scenario B) is close behind.

If the Packers had the top win odds of all teams available to your entry in one of the next two weeks, you’d probably want to save them for the future, and bump them down below KC and ATL in the current week rankings. On the other hand, if you have other good options besides the Packers in the next two weeks, you’d want to go ahead and rank them first this week for that entry.

When ranking KC vs ATL, if they seem roughly equal in the consensus EV values, the team with the higher current week win odds should generally be ranked higher.