Survivor Pool Glossary: Every Term Explained in Plain English

Survivor pools have their own vocabulary, and most of it is never explained to you when you join one. This is a plain-English glossary of the terms you will run into in a pool chat, on a podcast, or on this site. Where a term maps to something we actually compute, the definition links to the page that shows the work.

Pool formats and rules

Survivor pool (also: eliminator, knockout, last man standing)

Pick one NFL team to win each week. If your team wins, you advance. If it loses, you are out. You cannot pick the same team twice in a season. That no-reuse rule is what makes the game hard: you are not picking the best team this week, you are budgeting 18 weeks of teams.

Confidence pool

A different game that is often confused with survivor. In a confidence pool you pick every game on the slate and assign each one a point value ranking your confidence. You are not eliminated — you accumulate points. Survivor is one pick, sudden death; confidence is every game, weighted scoring. Strategy transfers badly between the two.

Entry

One life in the pool. A single-entry pool gives every player one; a multi-entry pool lets you buy several, and each entry keeps its own separate list of used teams.

Buy-back / mulligan

House rules that soften elimination. A buy-back lets an eliminated player pay to re-enter, usually only through a set week. A mulligan gives every entry one forgiven loss. Both change correct strategy, because a pool where a loss is survivable rewards more aggressive early picks. Rules are covered in full in the rules guide.

Picking and the field

Chalk

The obvious pick — the biggest favourite of the week, and usually the most popular one. "Taking the chalk" means picking with the crowd. Chalk is not wrong; it is just crowded, and crowding is what decides ties at the end.

Pick popularity

The share of the field expected to pick a given team in a given week. A team at 40% popularity means roughly four in ten surviving entries are on it. Popularity matters because if that team loses, 40% of the field dies with it — and if it wins, you have gained nothing on anybody.

Leverage

Deliberately picking away from the crowd to gain ground on the field. Example: the field is 45% on a 90% favourite; you take a different 82% favourite. You give up eight points of win probability in exchange for a large payoff in the branch where the chalk loses. Leverage is only worth paying for in big pools, late in the season, or when a prize is winner-take-all.

Future value / team budgeting

Because a team can only be used once, spending a strong team this week means not having it in a week where you would need it more. A pick is expensive when the team you burn is one of the few good options on a future slate.

Probability and pricing

Moneyline

The straight price on a team to win, with no point spread. Moneylines are the input we use for win probability, because they are a direct market statement about who wins the game.

Vig (juice)

The bookmaker's built-in margin. Raw moneyline prices on the two sides of a game add up to more than 100% — that surplus is the vig, and it is the house's cut, not information about the teams.

Devigged win probability

The market's honest opinion, with the bookmaker's margin removed so the two sides sum to exactly 100%. Every win probability on this site is devigged and averaged across multiple books rather than taken from a single price. The full procedure is on the methodology page.

Book depth

How many separate bookmakers contributed to a number. A consensus built from nine books is more trustworthy than one built from two, and we show the count rather than hiding it.

Closing line

The final price before kickoff. It is the most informed price of the week because it has absorbed injury news, weather and lineup decisions. The midweek line has not.

Terms specific to this site

Equity score

Our single number for how good a pick is once the crowd is accounted for: devigged win probability minus a quarter of the expected pick popularity. It intentionally penalises heavily-picked teams, so a slightly-less-safe team that nobody is on can rate above the chalk.

Formula

equity = win prob − (0.25 × popularity)

Inputs

devigged consensus moneylines

Purpose

balance safety against crowding

Path survival

The probability that a whole sequence of picks survives to a target week, not just this week's pick. It is what the season simulator estimates by running the rest of the year thousands of times under a no-reuse constraint. Single-week thinking says "pick the safest team"; path survival says "pick the team that leaves you the best remaining board."

Elimination proxy

A late-season team with nothing left to play for — mathematically eliminated, or close enough that the season is over in practice. These are the games where lineup news arrives late and matters most, and they are the basis of the one factor that survived our testing. See the elimination timing guide or the full Edge Lab writeup.

Factor register

Our public log of every strategy idea we tested and whether it held up, including the eight that did not. It lives in the Edge Lab.