Week 5 Survivor Picks From the FantasyLabs Survivor Pool Tool

As a longtime survivor pool player — and one-time winner — I’m thrilled that we have added survivor pool coverage to our industry-best suite of NFL tools.

In the old days, before the season started, I would manually build out a table with every NFL team’s projected chance of winning every game of the season. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, but a valuable one for survivor contests.

In survivor pools, the aim is simple: pick one team each week, and if they win, you survive. However, you can use each team only once. That means finding the optimal spot to use the best teams in the league is important to avoid being in a tough position later in the season.

Being able to visualize each team’s odds at various points is crucial, as it helps you avoid situations where you can’t use any of the week’s strong favorites. Our new tool does exactly that — plus includes the projected popularity of each team for the current week, as well as their aggregate “future value” at a glance:

The tool also allows you to mark which teams you’ve already used, eliminating them from the full season table:

Before we get into my favorite Week 2 options, here’s a reminder of some general survivor pool strategy.

General Strategy

Much like daily fantasy sports, survivor pools are more about overall strategy than predicting the outcome of football games.

While the obvious goal is to survive as long as possible, the actual aim is to survive longer than your opponents. Most pools pay out only to the first-place finisher, with the prize pool chopped in case multiple entrants last the entirety of the season.

That means not all winning weeks are created equal, as advancing on a week where other entries fail is more valuable. That gives us a third variable to consider in our selections. Not only are the team’s odds of winning and future value important, but their popularity is as well.

If you can fade a popular team with strong future value and advance, it’s a double-whammy of leverage. Not only were you unique this week, but you’ll also be able to use a team that most of the field doesn’t have later in the season.

It’s also vital to consider your pool’s settings and size. Some pools have different rule sets, including weeks with multiple picks, whether ties count as a win or not, and even potentially opportunities to return following a loss. For this column I’ll be assuming a standard rule set, where one loss is an elimination and there are no multi-pick weeks.

Pool size is also important. Using our tool, we can do some back-of-the-envelope math to figure out the rough odds of surviving all season using the best available option. Based on my estimates, about 1% of the field is likely to last 17 weeks, and about half of those make it all 18 weeks. That means pools of 100 entrants or less are likely to wrap up before the end of the season, so the strategy is different based on pool size.

In this space, I’ll be giving out my favorite picks for large-field public contests like those found on DraftKings, as well as options for smaller pools like you might play in with friends or coworkers, since the strategy changes tremendously based on how long you’ll need to survive to win.

Here’s another sneak peek of what the tool shows:

Week 5 Picks

Large-Field Contests: Los Angeles Rams

Leverage is especially important in large-field contests in Week 5, since it’s been a relatively chalky start to the season. Most larger contests have 60% or so of original entrants remaining, which means we can get more EV by taking a contrarian pick than we can by leaning into safety.

This is where the Rams come in. Thanks to some reasonable future value and slightly lower projected win odds, they’re expected to be used by less than 5% of the field on a week where three teams check in at over 20%.

Plus, using our full-season grid, we can see that the only other week where the Rams are one of the strongest options (Week 9) also features another strong team in the Packers. I don’t like planning too far ahead with the Rams since a Matthew Stafford injury would drastically impact their odds, and he’s 38 years old with a chronic back injury.

With that said, it might be worthwhile to make it a point to save the Packers in entrants that use the Rams, or avoid the Rams if you’ve already used Green Bay.

Small-Field Contests: Arizona Cardinals

As always, being contrarian is less important in smaller-field contests, since the likeliest outcome is a solo winner sometime before Week 18, even with a relatively easy start to the season. Safety and future value become more relevant.

Arizona is the clear best option in the latter category. They’re implied for an 80% or so win rate this week, with no other games remaining this season above 65%. They’ve been used already by a good chunk of the field, which will stop them from being as chalky as they would be otherwise, though they are projected to be the most popular team.

Still, both the Colts and the Lions are projecting for similar usage, so there’s still an opportunity to move past a big chunk of the field while using Arizona. If you’ve already burned them, Detroit is a solid alternative. They’ve got more future value, but this is still their highest projected win odds for the rest of the season.

Pictured: Marvin Harrison Jr.

Photo Credit: Imagn

As a longtime survivor pool player — and one-time winner — I’m thrilled that we have added survivor pool coverage to our industry-best suite of NFL tools.

The tool also allows you to mark which teams you’ve already used, eliminating them from the full season table:

Before we get into my favorite Week 2 options, here’s a reminder of some general survivor pool strategy.