What If Pick Popularity In My Pool Is Different Than What’s Shown In The Product?
If you think the pick rates in your pool will be very different than the public pick percentages, we explain how to figure out your picks.
Our My Pool Picks custom pick rankings are based on three main inputs for each team:
- Projected win probability for the current week (PG Win Odds)
- Projected pick percentage for the current week in a standard pool (Popularity)
- Projected value of saving the team for future weeks (Future Value)
If you know your pool’s pick rates are different (or if you feel strongly that our win odds for a team are wrong), you may want to adjust the rank order.
Here’s how.
1. Get custom pick rankings for your pool, and sort by Immediate EV.
Step through the My Pool Picks custom picks creation process as you normally would, answering the weekly questions. At the end you’ll get our suggested pick rankings. If you click the “Immediate EV” column label, you can sort by Immediate EV. Make sure the column is sorted in descending order, and save this sorted list for later.
2. Use the EV Calculator to find a new Immediate EV ranking for your pool.
We recommend doing this step in a separate browser tab or window, so that you can switch back and forth between the custom pick rankings from Step 1, and these custom EV rankings.
You can find the EV Calculator using the link in the top navigation menu. Once the tool is loaded, enter your pool size (not counting your own entries) on the first screen. Then on the second screen, you can adjust the win odds (left side) or number of picks (right side) for each team.
Once you have changed the inputs, click the big blue “Get Top EV Picks” button at the top. We’ll do some calculations behind the scenes, and return a list of all teams, ranked by their Immediate EV. This list will also show the Immediate EV that we’ve calculated based on your inputs.
You can see more on Expected Value and how it is determined here.
3. Record the rises and falls for relevant teams in the custom EV rankings.
You should now have two sets of Immediate EV rankings — your original ranking from the My Pool Picks tool (Step 1), and the custom EV rankings based on your updated pool pick% (Step 2). If you compare the two, you can see how many spots up or down the rankings each team moved.
For every team where you made a significant change to their pool pick%, record the number of spots up or down the EV rankings that team moved. You’ll use these values in the next step.
In this example, let’s pretend you increased Denver’s pick% from 10% to 15%, and that the Broncos were ranked 2nd in Immediate EV in your custom pick rankings, and 4th in EV when you use the EV Calculator. That’s a drop of 2 spots.
Compare the two lists, and record the rises or drops for all the teams that you made pick% changes to, as in the Denver example above.
4. Adjust your My Pool Picks custom pick rankings to account for these rises and falls
Go back to your custom pick rankings, and sort by Tier, to get the original suggested rankings. Take the EV rises and drops from Step 3, and move those teams up or down the custom pick rankings he same number of spots.
For example, if Denver was your #1 suggested pick previously, but their EV rank dropped by 2 spots, you’d move them down to the #3 pick in your adjusted pick rankings.
Do this for all the teams where you made significant pick% changes. If there’s an ambiguous case where the order that you move the teams will change the final ranking, you can just consider those ambiguous cases a tie.
5. Use these new/adjusted rankings when making your pick(s)
Once you have your new ordered list of teams, you can use it as we suggest using the My Pool Picks custom pick rankings. When playing a single entry in a single pool, simply select the highest ranked team you have available. When playing multiple entries, you can use these adjusted rankings instead of our original suggested My Pool Picks custom rankings in the first step of creating your pick portfolio (for more details on creating a pick portfolio, see our article linked in the right sidebar).