What If I Can Pick A Team As Many Times As I Want?

If you can pick a team as many times as you want in your survivor pool (meaning you could pick the Seahawks every week if you so desired), then your pool differs from a standard-rules pool in two main ways: You don’t need to consider a team’s Future Value at all In order to maximize […]

If you can pick a team as many times as you want in your survivor pool (meaning you could pick the Seahawks every week if you so desired), then your pool differs from a standard-rules pool in two main ways:

You don’t need to consider a team’s Future Value at all

In order to maximize your long term expected winnings, if you only had one entry in a pool like this, you should simply pick the team with the best balance of high win odds and low popularity each week. In TR terminology, that is the team with the highest “Immediate EV” (current week expected value), which balances win odds and popularity, but ignores future value.

The weekly pick popularity for teams will almost certainly be different than in pools where you can only use each team once

Because of the different rules in your pool, the public picking trends data we use to optimize picks for pools where you can only use each team once probably won’t be representative of how popular teams are in your pool. In a pool like this, the best teams in the NFL will almost surely be picked repeatedly by many players, and that’s a big deal.

Using The EV Calculator For These Pools

Fortunately, one of the tools in our NFL Survivor Picks product, the EV Calculator (see link in the top navigation bar), is a great resource for making smart picks in these types of pools.

The EV Calculator ranks teams each week while ignoring their Future Value, and it let’s you customize public picking data for your specific pool.

Step 1: Estimate Pick Popularity In Your Pool

To start, you need to make some guesses as to which teams will be more and less popular in your pool in the current week, and estimate the pick percentage for each team. (That’s not quite as complex as it seems, since a lot of teams will be picked by no one, or almost no one.)

Once you come up with these pick popularity estimates, you’ll enter them into the EV Calculator to see which teams have the highest Immediate EV in your pool in the current week.

We suggest using the betting markets as a rough guide to your pool’s popularity. In pools like these, the bigger favorites of the week should consistently be the most popular picks in your pool.

In addition, studying your the past picks of your opponents may help you figure out a bias you can exploit. Do they generally load up on the very biggest favorite? Do they tend to avoid picking road teams?

Use any trends you discover to help project the current week’s pick percentage for each team.

A Hypothetical Example

Let’s imagine we’re in a pool with 100 opponents, and there’s a week where the Vegas point spreads for the top teams are:

  • KC -11
  • ARI -9
  • DEN -8
  • GB -8
  • CAR -8
  • NYJ -8
  • SEA -6
  • No other teams better than -3

Assuming we don’t know much about our opponents’ picking trends, let’s just use the betting markets as a guide, and plug the following expected opponent pick counts into the EV Calculator:

  • KC – 38 picks
  • ARI – 15 picks
  • DEN – 11 picks
  • GB – 11 picks
  • CAR – 11 picks
  • NYJ – 11 picks
  • SEA – 3 picks

These are just rough guesses based on the relative point spreads of each team, plus building in some extra bias toward KC, the clear “safest” looking pick. A lot of people (relatively) will tend to pick the biggest favorite each week in a pool like this.

Step 2: Get EV Rankings

In the EV Calculator, you’re also allowed to customize the projected win odds for each team, but there’s no reason to change the default odds that are loaded in. Our game prediction models are solid, and based on the latest objective data and betting lines.

So once you enter in your projected pick popularity for each team by adjusting the defaults in the tool, just click the “Get Top EV Picks” button.

Here’s a hypothetical set of resulting EV rankings and calculations, starting with the highest Immediate EV:

  • DEN 1.09
  • ARI 1.02
  • GB 1.00
  • CAR 1.00
  • NYJ 0.98
  • SEA 0.98
  • KC 0.97

Keep in mind that those EV calculations depend on both the accuracy of your opponent pick estimates and on the size of your pool. So the better your pick popularity estimates are, the more accurate the EV Calculator results will be, and the bigger edge you’ll have in your pool.

In this imaginary scenario, the EV Calculator results are telling us that:

  • Our public pick estimates are distributed in a way that gives most of the big favorites similar Immediate EV, since differences of 0.01 or 0.02 are not very significant. That implies that on the whole, if your opponents pick the way you think they will, they are making pretty smart picks and there aren’t many biases to exploit.
  • However, the primary exception is Denver, with an Immediate EV quite a bit higher than 1.0. An EV value of greater than 1 implies that Denver will be picked less often than they “should” be, based on its win odds estimates.

So in a pool where you can pick any team any week, Denver looks like the clear top pick in this example week, with several other teams roughly tied for second best. So our recommendations would be:

  • If you’re playing only a single entry in this imaginary pool, pick Denver.
  • If you’re playing multiple entries, use these pick rankings as the basis of composing your overall pick portfolio. That process is explained in our Portfolio Strategy article (linked in the right sidebar).

Hopefully that’s clear. With the added step of estimating opponent picking trends in your pool each week, this process is somewhat more involved than getting customized picks for other pool types we support.

Still, the end result should be a similarly strong edge over the vast majority of your opponents, especially if you’re playing multiple picks and using our pick portfolio guidelines.