How to Start a Survivor Pool With Friends or Coworkers

Running a survivor pool is mostly an organisational job, not a football job. The pools that fall apart almost never fall apart over a game result — they fall apart because a rule was never written down and two people remembered it differently in week 6.

This guide covers the decisions worth making before week 1. It is about format and administration only. It is not advice on collecting, holding or distributing money, and it does not recommend any particular platform — check what is permitted where you live and in your workplace before organising anything.

Decide the entry structure first

Everything else follows from this. Single-entry means one pick per person per week, and it stays a simple game of survival. Multi-entry means people can run several independent entries, which changes the maths substantially: entrants can hedge by splitting entries across different teams, and the pool usually runs deeper into the season before anyone is eliminated.

• Single-entry: simpler, fairer for casual groups, shorter season.
• Multi-entry: more strategic depth, needs a cap so one person cannot dominate the field.
• If you allow multi-entry, state the cap explicitly — two, three, five — before signups open.

The full comparison of formats, including buy-backs and mulligans, is in Survivor Pool Rules Explained.

Write down the edge-case rules before anyone needs them

These are the four that cause every argument. Decide them in advance and put them in the same message as the signup, where nobody can claim they never saw it.

What happens if a game ties?

Regular-season ties are rare but they happen. The common conventions are that a tie survives, a tie eliminates, or a tie is treated as a no-pick. Pick one. Any of them is defensible; none of them is defensible if you choose it after the tie has already happened.

What happens if someone does not submit a pick?

The two usual options are elimination, or auto-assigning a default team such as the largest remaining favourite the entrant has not used. Auto-assignment is friendlier for casual groups; elimination keeps the game honest in serious ones. Say which.

Are there buy-backs or mulligans?

A buy-back lets an eliminated entrant re-enter, usually once and usually before a set week. A mulligan forgives one wrong pick. Both make the pool last longer and both need a hard cutoff week.

How does the pool end if several people are still alive?

If more than one entry survives week 18, the usual conventions are an even split among survivors, or a tiebreaker such as cumulative margin of victory across the season. Decide the tiebreaker in week 0, and if it involves accumulating a stat, tell people at the start — it changes how they pick all year.

Set one deadline and one submission method

Most pools use kickoff of the first game of the week as the deadline, which in practice means Thursday night. Some use Sunday''s first kickoff and treat Thursday games as ineligible. Either works. Mixing them does not.

• One deadline, stated in a named timezone, the same every week.
• One submission channel — a shared sheet, a form, a single thread. Not three.
• Picks visible to everyone or hidden until lock: decide up front, because visible picks change how people play.
• Send a reminder the day before. Most missed picks are people who simply forgot, and chasing them is easier than adjudicating them.

Agree the prize structure before signups, whatever the prize is

Whether your pool plays for a trophy, bragging rights, lunch, or nothing at all, agree the structure in writing before anyone enters: winner-takes-all, a split for the last few survivors, or an even split among everyone still alive at the end. This is a format decision, and like the tie rule it only causes problems when it is settled late.

We are an analytics tool. We do not host pools, run contests, or handle entries or payouts of any kind — how your group organises itself is entirely up to your group, and worth checking against local rules and your workplace''s policies.

Before week 1

1. Entry structure and cap decided.
2. Tie, missed-pick, buy-back and tiebreaker rules written down and circulated.
3. Deadline, timezone and submission channel fixed.
4. Prize or end-of-season structure agreed in advance.
5. Everyone pointed at the same rules message.

If your entrants are new to the format, Common Survivor Pool Mistakes Beginners Make and the Survivor Pool Glossary are the two things worth sending with the invite.