If you’re a serious fantasy football player, your burning desire to compete against friends, foes and family members in NFL-related contests probably doesn’t stop there.

You’re likely planning to stake a year’s worth of bragging rights — and at least some of your hard-earned cash — on an NFL office pool this season, such as a weekly pick’em contest or a survivor style pool.

(If you’re not playing in football pools, by the way, keep reading to learn why you should.)

In our 2018 article series for FantasyPros, we’re going to review and explore some of the foundational strategies for winning NFL pick’em pools, football confidence pools, and NFL survivor pools in 2018. We’ll also be guests on a special edition FantasyPros podcast about football pools during NFL Week 1, so be sure to give it a listen.

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TeamRankings has provided data-driven picks, tools, and analysis for football pools and betting since 2000. You can check out their NFL pick’em pool picks, NFL survivor picks, and NFL betting picks.

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Why You Need To Play In Football Pools
Relative to fantasy football, office pools get less attention when it comes to players’ desire to seek out research and analysis that gives them an edge. Yet NFL and college football pools draw tens of millions of players every year.

That means the following two things are probably true:

• You know someone, somewhere, running an NFL pick’em or survivor pool you can enter
• Most entrants in that pool won’t really understand how to make picks in the optimal way, in order to maximize their odds to win

Those two dynamics present a fantastic profit opportunity, but exploiting it requires, again, two things:

• The skills and data to understand and apply the optimal picking strategy
• The mental discipline to persevere with that strategy for 17 weeks, despite likely variance in week to week results

If you can pull it off, your reward (most of the time at least) is going to be a pretty huge edge to win your NFL pool. In some cases, our research indicates that a “sharp” football pool player has 5-10x the chance to win a prize compared to an averagely skilled player.

Compared to fantasy leagues filled with hard core owners willing to ignore their own crying children on Sunday morning to scour the web for late breaking news, office pools are inefficient markets — and that’s where you want your money to be.

Optimal Football Pool Strategy: It’s Not Easy
Here’s the challenge, though. Maximizing your odds to win an NFL pool is far more complicated than just figuring out the most likely teams to win each week.

In some ways, the nature of NFL pools is similar to fantasy football. Just as in season-long fantasy, you compete against other people, as opposed to a “house” as you do in traditional sports betting. Your goal in football pools, as in fantasy, is simply to beat all of your opponents. It doesn’t matter how good you are picking winners overall, as long as you pick more winners than all (or almost all) of the other players.

However, in NFL pools you don’t draft your own unique team. So the decision-making is more similar to daily fantasy, where every NFL player is available to every contest entrant. In short, everyone in the pool typically needs to make the same set of decisions, though survivor pools get more complicated since you can only pick each team once during the season.

In these kinds of situations, optimal strategy requires you look beyond the matchups themselves and place a much greater emphasis on the pick decisions that you expect your opponents to make. After all:

• The only way you can win an NFL pick’em contest is by getting more picks right than all of your opponents.
• The only way you can get more picks right than an opponent is by getting at least one pick right that they get wrong.

As a result, it’s a rare case where a football pool player is able maximize their odds to win without picking “against the crowd” to some extent. So right off the bat, if you’re not carefully studying public picking trends when making your weekly pool picks, you’re already at a disadvantage to sharp players — and that’s just one strategic factor you need to consider.

How We Approach NFL Pools
Since 2000, we’ve been studying the dynamics of sports pools. In 2005, after realizing that optimal pool pick strategy required a much deeper level of analysis than Excel spreadsheets, we started down the road of building technology and algorithms to exploit the inefficiencies inherent in popular football pools and scoring systems.

So far, the results have been very strong. Last year, 81% of our subscribers reported winning either a season-long or weekly prize in a football pick’em contest, and our subscribers reported a total of over $1 million in NFL survivor pool winnings.

We still have plenty of work to do to get close to what we would consider truly “optimal” picks for many different types of NFL pools, but the results so far speak for themselves. And if we had to sum up our approach to making pool picks in two words, they would be: Context Matters.

Here are three examples of what we mean. If you’re not considering the factors below when you make your NFL pool picks this year, you’re almost certainly not making the best picks.

1. The Number Of Entries In Your Pool
Just as the number of players in your fantasy league impacts your approach to drafting, the total number of entries in your NFL pool impacts your best picking strategy.

For example, the more entries there are in your pool, the more likely it is that one (or a few) entries get very lucky with their picks this season. You still need to beat those lucky entries to win, so if you pick too conservatively in a large pool, you’re going to lower your odds of winning a prize. Similarly, if you pick too aggressively in a small pool, your win odds will suffer.

2. Your Pool’s Rules And Scoring System
You wouldn’t want to draft the exact same team in a PPR scoring system vs. a standard scoring system, and a similar logic holds for NFL pools.

For example, one of the most popular rule variations in survivor pools forces players whose entries survive until late in the season to start picking two teams per week, both of which must win their games in order for the entry to make it to the next week.

That rule tweak has a significant impact on how you should approach making picks in earlier weeks (when you only need to pick one team) and places a greater emphasis on saving better teams for potential use later in the season.

3. Your Pool’s Payout Structure
Season-long fantasy football has the playoffs, which introduces new dimensions of decision making as the end of the season nears. A pool’s payout structure can have a similar effect.

For example, assume your NFL pick’em pool is winner-take-all and you’re in fourth place with two weeks to go. In that scenario, you may have no chance of catching the leader unless you start aggressively picking more unpopular teams and upsets, and hope for the best. It’s your only chance to win, if you assume the pool leader is going to act rationally, play it safe and pick mostly favorites over the last couple weeks.

However, that approach could be a terrible strategy if your pool splits its prize pot equally among the top five finishers. Aggressively picking more upsets would increase your odds of catching the current leader (from slim to slightly less slim), but at the same time, your odds of dropping out of the top five entirely and completely missing out on a prize would skyrocket.

The three strategy dynamics above provide a small sample of the types of things you need to be thinking about when making NFL pool picks. In our upcoming articles, we are going to expand upon more specific dynamics for NFL pick’em and survivor pools. Finally, we’ll share some of our analysis for the NFL Week 1 slate and beyond.

Special Offer For FantasyPros Readers: Get up to 60% off a TeamRankings premium subscription when you sign up before the 2018 NFL season starts. Discounts are available on NFL pick’em pool picks, NFL survivor picks, and NFL betting picks.

All Articles In This Series

Part 2: How The Pros Dominate Football Pick’em Contests
Part 3: Value-Driven Picking In NFL Survivor Pools