What If A Risky Team Is My Top Ranked Pick Of The Week?

Sometimes, we might recommend a team that you find too risky. We explain why these picks are made. Ultimately, you have the choice.

The ideal Survivor pick scores highly in three traits:

• Safety (high win odds)
• Popularity (low pick percentage)
• Future Value (not very useful in future weeks)

However, we don’t live in an ideal world. (Nickelback exists, after all.)

Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

Meatloaf, on the other hand, summarizes it best. Often the best pick of the week has at least one weakness:

• Teams with high win odds and low future value will usually have high popularity.
• Teams with high win odds that are unpopular are usually unpopular because they have high future value, and people are saving them for later.
• Teams with low future value that are unpopular are usually unpopular because they have lower win odds than the safest pick(s) of the week.

Because the ultimate goal is out-surviving all of your opponents, if we have to make a pick with a big weakness, we’re generally more willing to accept high popularity or high future value rather than low win odds.

However, our system is designed to weigh all three traits and figure out the right balance for your pool. And sometimes the right balance is to pick a riskier team with low popularity and low future value.

How Can A Risky Pick Help You Win Your Pool?

Remember that our use of the term “risky” here is relative. It would take an extremely rare pool scenario for us to push game theory driven analysis to the limits and actually suggest that you pick a team that is not expected to win its game (i.e. a team that has less than 50% win odds).

Generally, the riskiest our top recommended pick gets for a pool with traditional survivor rules is win odds in the mid 60% range — still a decent favorite, but with about a 1-in-3 chance to lose its game. For the sake of comparison, the safest available pick of the week will typically has a 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 chance to lose its game.

That’s a significant, although not huge, difference. (People generally tend to overvalue the chances of the biggest favorites of the week winning.)

So, how can a relatively riskier pick actually maximize your odds to win your pool?

Low Popularity

When you pick a team with low popularity and lower win odds, you are often doing so in order to avoid picking a more popular team. The idea here is that your best outcome for the week is (a) your unpopular pick wins while (b) the popular team loses. That outcome carries an extremely high reward, because it means you survive while a lot of your opponents are eliminated, which greatly increases your pool equity.

The reward for picking a very popular, yet safer team isn’t nearly as great. If you survive, so do many of your opponents who also picked that team, and you likely don’t actually gain any pool equity.

On balance, the chance that you don’t survive the current week is higher picking the the less popular, riskier team. But if we’re suggesting the riskier pick, it means we’ve done the calculations and think the risk/reward tradeoff is worth it, once you also take future value into account.

Low Future Value

When you pick a team with a low Future Value score, it means you are preserving your options in future weeks. Remember, you need to survive many weeks (probably the whole season in larger pools) in order to win.

As a result, at some points during the season, you’re almost certainly going to have to pick a risky team and hope that they win. Here’s the kicker that most people have trouble understanding, though: Making a risky pick now and a safe pick later is no different (survival-wise) from making a safe pick now and a risky pick later.

In other words, if you’re pool is almost certain to last all season, losing in Week 1 is no worse than losing in Week 15. Winning a survivor pool is an all-or-nothing affair. Optimizing your picks to have the best chance to beat all of your opponents often requires to you take advantage of educated gambles that present themselves early on.

Simply being able to say, “Hey I didn’t win the pool, but at least I survived to Week 10” is an illusion of skill. You lost the pool — and your reward was no greater than the player who lost in Week 1 or 2. And odds are you lost the pool at least partly because you were too conservative early on.

If Your Goal Is NOT To Maximize Long Term Expected Value, You Can Change Picks

Our pick rankings operate under the assumption that you want to maximize your Survivor pool earnings, over the long run — aka, your lifetime. Because of that, we sometimes make suggestions that will slightly lower your chance of winning something this year, if the result is a large increase in your average expected value.

In other words, if the choices are splitting your pool’s prize pot with 10 other people every year, or winning the entire prize pool all by yourself every 3 years, our pick logic will aim for the second option. Overall, you’ll win much more money with the second option, but it also means you’ll win nothing 2 out of every 3 years, vs. winning at least some money every year.

If your priorities are different — if you’d rather sacrifice some expected long term profit from survivor pools in order to increase your chance of winning at least something this year — then you may want to slightly alter our pick rankings. In that case, you can place a bit more emphasis on safer teams, and take a pass on the highest rated pick if it just feels to risky for you. Just understand that this is a tradeoff.

Just Don’t Confuse Strategy And Results

The biggest challenge we have from a customer satisfaction standpoint with our NFL Survivor Picks product is that some subscribers confuse strategy with results. If our algorithms recommend a riskier pick that ends up losing, while the most popular pick of the week ends up winning, we hear complaints: “Can’t believe I trusted you guys!!!” etc.

We understand that to some degree, this is inevitable. People pay money for our advice, they want to win, or at least “put in a good showing” in their pools.

But we have to be firm here. Our job is to show you the picks that maximize your chance to win your pool. In survivor pools, the best picks you can make often increase your risk to be eliminated in the early weeks, compared to an opponent playing a sub-optimal, excessively conservative strategy.

If you want to play survivor pools like a pro, you need to be comfortable with this scenario. (It’s also why playing a portfolio of multiple picks is such a big benefit, to help diversify your risk each week.)

If it’s too much anxiety to bear, nothing’s stopping you from sacrificing some edge and picking a safer team than the #1 ranked pick for your pool. Most of the time, the teams ranked as “Top Options” for your pool all fairly closely rated, so not picking the #1 team certainly isn’t the end of the world, if you just can’t get behind it psychologically.