How Pools Work
What's a Pool?
One pick, every week, from that week's real NFL games — and you can never pick the same team twice. Get it wrong and you're out, or take a strike if your host allows more than one. Outlast everybody else and the pot's yours.
Two Ways to Play
Same weekly pick, opposite goal — your host locks in the format before the pool opens.
Pick a team to win — a loss puts you out.
Ride the favorites while they last
Pick a team to lose — a win puts you out.
Survivor, flipped: your team has to lose
The No-Reuse Rule
Here's the twist that makes this a game and not a coin flip: once your entry picks a team, that team is done for the season. Burned. You can never pick them again, win or lose.
Week 1 feels easy. Week 10 feels like a squeeze. Burn your best favorite too early in Survivor and you're stuck with a toss-up when it actually matters — hold it too long and you might not get the chance to use it at all. Losers plays the same math backwards: save your worst team for when you need a guaranteed loss, but wait too long and someone else's bye week beats you to it. Think of your used-teams list as a hand you're dealt at the start — except you choose the order you play it. In Survivor, the temptation is to burn the best team on the board every single week. Do that for four weeks straight, and by week 5 you're picking from whoever's left — often a team you'd never trust with your season. A better approach: map out your favorites' schedules ahead of time. Save a heavy favorite for a week when the rest of the board looks ugly — bye weeks, division rematches, backups getting snaps.
How You Play
1. Join before kickoff. Entries close once the first week's last game starts — no buying back in.
2. Make your pick. One team, from that week's real slate.
3. It locks at kickoff. Change it as often as you like until your team takes the field.
4. Live to pick again, or take a strike. Get the result you need and you're through to next week.
What picking looks like
One entry, one week of the slate.
Lions Your pick
The Lions are this week's pick — changeable until kickoff. The Chiefs are crossed out: burned in an earlier week, off the board for the rest of the season.
House Rules
Your host locks in a few settings before the pool opens: how many strikes it takes to eliminate you (one, by default), whether ties and missed picks cost a strike or let you slide, and how many entries one person can hold (five, by default). Details on all of it below.
Strikes default to one — sudden death, one wrong pick and you're out. Hosts can allow more: three strikes means you can take two hits and still be alive. A tie doesn't clearly satisfy "your team won" or "your team lost," so the host decides which way it breaks — some pools count it as a strike, others let every entry survive. Forget to make a pick and it's the same deal: an automatic strike, or an auto-pick at the week's first kickoff that you can still change like any other pick, right up until it locks. Multiple entries are allowed too, up to a cap your host sets — five is the default. Each extra entry is its own lifeline: its own picks, its own strikes, its own used-teams list.
How You Win
A pool ends one of three ways: one entry outlasts everyone and takes it all, the whole field goes down together in a wipeout and those entries split the pot, or the season ends with more than one entry alive and they split it.
The host sets an entry price — per entry, not per person — and decides what share of the pot goes to winners. 90% is common, with the rest covering the house or a cause. Not playing for money? Pools work just as well for bragging rights.
Every Week Gets Harder
The field thins fast, and nobody comes back.
How a pool plays out
A 20-entry survivor pool, week by week.
Chalk city. Every favorite wins.
Three Sunday upsets. Seven strikes taken.
The unbeaten teams are used up. Five gone in one weekend.
A Thursday night stunner. Down to three.
One entry survives Monday night. Pool's over.
That's the pool. Simple to start, brutal to finish, and somebody's always sweating a Monday night score.