It was another tough week in Survivor Pools, with more than two-thirds of the remaining field in the DraftKings $100 pool being eliminated due to losses from popular options like the Browns, Bengals and Bucs.
Unfortunately, the list of losers included two of the three picks recommended in this article. If you played three contests this year and followed all of the picks, you'd be down to one surviving entry — still well ahead of the average rate.
For the sake of the article, I'll be updating the PoolGenius tool with either Seattle (one of our picks last week) or the Jets (the most popular winner) depending on availability.
That brings us to our NFL survivor pool strategy for Week 4.
The concept is simple: Pick one team that wins an NFL game every week. No spreads or totals, just winners. Once you use that team, they're done — creating an element of strategy and long-term planning that makes these contests deceptively difficult.
Fortunately, this year, we're partnering with our friends at PoolGenius to make things easier. They've built slate-leading tools to help conquer a variety of pool contests, including survivor.
My favorite feature of the site is the ability to customize for your individual pool type. Factors like contest size and payout structure are a huge factor in survivor contests as smaller fields generally don't have any entries make it all 18 weeks.
To give a glimpse of how that works, all season I'll be providing their top option for small (less than 100), and large (1,000+) entry pools.
Besides that, PoolGenius tracks pick selection data to help figure out contrarian options. This is helpful in larger pools since we're also trying to optimize for expected value.
Finally, they use projected future spreads to assign a future value to each team — which includes considering the scarcity of strong options on certain weeks. This is crucial, as we don't want to burn the best teams when there are other strong options that week.
To get their full data, you'll need to sign up for the site. It's well worth it though, and it also includes tools for taking down the increasingly popular pick'em contests that feature massive prize pools.
NFL Survivor Pool Strategy Week 4
| Get Survivor Picks Now |
|---|
| NFL Survivor Picks from PoolGenius |
| Season Discounts via Action Network |
| Free Trial Offer (Survivor, Pick'em, Betting) |
Large Field Survivor Pick: San Francisco 49ers
With less than 5% of the field remaining, the odds of any entries making it all 18 weeks have diminished considerably, even in massive-field contests.
That means we probably shouldn't worry too much about future value, and instead focus on having the best chance to last one more week.
That's where the 49ers come in. Their -550 moneyline odds this week against New England are the best on the slate, and it's also the highest they'll have all year based on current lookahead lines.
While they're popular, a 33% usage rate still leaves plenty of opportunities for other entries to get eliminated, and we're not as concerned about that as we would've been had more teams made it this far.
Small Field: New York Jets
Smaller field contests are where things get very interesting. The 100-player contest I've based these picks on is down to just six entrants, meaning one could take home the prize in the next week or two.
That puts a huge premium on making unique selections, as picking the same team as all of your competitors guarantees that you won't make any progress against the field.
The Jets are a solid compromise in that regard, as you're giving up just six percent win equity based on their moneyline while not going with the chalky option.
They're also much less valuable over the next couple weeks than the 49ers or Chiefs, so you can also gain an edge on entrants that use them this week — even if all three teams win.
RotoGrinders Second Chance Survivor: Houston Texans
This contest is down to less than 10% of it's initial entrants, despite starting in Week 2. It's looking relatively likely that the multiple pick weeks late in the season might not come into play, as the contest could wrap up before then at the current pace.
The PoolGenius tool is showing a fairly similar expected value (EV) between the Jets and Texans in this contest, but I'm going with Houston both for diversification reasons and future planning purposes.
Houston is 2% less likely to win than the Jets based on current odds, a fairly insignificant difference. However, they have less future value than the Jets. Crucially, they're only favored in one of their last three games and only have a 58% win chance in that one.
That means having the Jets — who're projected as 66% favorites in two of the last three games — available down the stretch could be important if we do need to make multiple picks in those weeks.
Plus, the Texans are slightly less popular this week, which gives us a better chance to gain ground on the roughly 100 entrants left in the contest.
