u/Cold_Issue_5093

So much for things getting back to normal. Last night's loss by Dallas was worse than either of this year's other two chalk disasters. The Chargers were Week 1's wipeout at 32% owned on Yahoo. Tampa Bay was Week 2's wipeout at 33.8%. Dallas was over 54%, the most popular pick of the season by a wide margin, somewhere around 35-40% of the field in the big contests like Circa and Splash. If that was your only entry, your season's over with 13 weeks still left on the schedule.

Side note: Tampa has now been involved in the two biggest wipeout games of the season, and they were responsible for the biggest wipeout last year in week 14 (61.4% field exposure). You really can't make this stuff up.

Sadly, this isn't a rare occurrence. I looked back at how often the most popular pick actually wins, going back 10 seasons of real Yahoo field-exposure data. Picks with heavy field support, 50% or more of the field, have still lost about 1 in 6 times. Note to self: Send this kind of data out before the game starts :-).

One guy on X said his pool started with 8,408 people, was down to 1,718 after Week 4, and 895 of those remaining entries, more than half, were on Dallas. Gone in one Thursday night game.

If you spread your picks out, you are still alive. One entry on the popular pick means one Thursday can end your year. A handful of entries on different teams means a bad Thursday is a setback instead of a funeral.

If Dallas was your only shot tonight, I feel for you. Don't let it happen twice. Spread your picks out.

I was hoping to get this out much earlier in the week, but things got a little sideaways.

This week was much better than last. I think most people who are still alive can probably say the same thing as almost all of the top picks, except the Bills, won.

My 6 wins included the Seahawks, Vikings, and Colts in my Buddy Pool, the Chiefs in Real Simple Football Pool, the Rams in BIG PRIZE Pool, and the Ravens in a new pool I just entered. My one loss was the Bills in one of my 4 remaining entries in my Buddy Pool.

That new pool is the Splash $100K Survivor ($25 buy-in). 3,837 of the 4,445 entries are still alive, so it's early and there's a long way to go. I'll be adding it to the diary from here on.

The buyback deadline in both Buddy Pool and Real Simple was Week 3, so that window is closed. From here on, every loss is a real elimination. I'll probably buy in to a pool starting in Week 5 to make up for the 1 entry I lost this week since I no longer have buybacks at my disposal in my current pools.

I have 6 entries alive across 4 pools: 3 in my Buddy Pool, plus one each in Real Simple, BIG PRIZE, and Splash. That's 5 of my original 15 entries plus the new Splash entry. Total prize money still in play is $397,976.

Here are my week-to-week results so far. I built a tool called SurvivorPulse (https://survivorpulse.com) mostly to help me track all this:

Week 4 - Season To Date Recap

Week 5 Rankings are up at https://survivorpulse.com/rankings if you want to see how I'm thinking about this week.

Curious how other people fared in Week 4. Did anyone else get burned by the Bills?

Here is my full Week 4 rundown:

Week 4 Results: 6-1, 6 entries alive across 4 pools

Things didn’t go my way in Week 3, but this is exactly why I play multiple pools and entries with buybacks where possible. I expect to have some sub-par weeks. I just don’t want to get wiped out.

I went 5-6 on my picks. Sadly, four of those losses were all due to the Seahawks. I’ll explain below why I stacked 4 entries on Seattle. My other two losses were with the Packers and Eagles. The good news is that the Green Bay entry has a buyback so I still have 6 entries alive. I did win with the Chiefs, Bills (2 entries), Niners, and Lions with my other entries. Not great, but also not catastrophic.

Here are my week-to-week results so far using SurvivorPulse:

Week 3 - Season To Date Recap

So why did I load up on Seattle this week?

I just pushed out some new research which I plan to post about later this week that looks at the survival probabilities over the last 10 seasons for duplicating picks across entries versus not duplicating them (https://survivorpulse.com/research/duplicating-vs-not-duplicating-picks). For the number of entries I had alive in Week 3 (11 entries) and using the Mild Lean (80/20 Blend) pick strategy with buybacks, the survival probability for different duplicated pick strategies is higher than no duplicated picks by anywhere from 15.8 to 27.5 points.

For Week 3, that is a survival probability of around 75 – 80% if I stacked more of my entries on the top-ranked pick across multiple entries versus about 60% if I used different picks across all my entries. Pretty compelling.

Also, Weeks 3 and 4 carry the largest survival probability discrepancy between duplicating picks and not duplicating picks of any of the weeks by far. Intuitively, this makes sense as the longer the season goes and the less entries you have the easier it is to spread different good picks across those entries. I decided to strike while the iron was hot. Unfortunately, the iron burned me.

Honestly, I think the rationale and the approach were sound. As we all know in survivor pools, even the best laid plans can backfire. Again, why you want as many entries as possible.

I messed up one thing, and I’m kicking myself for it. I had two entries with buybacks still in reserve, and I put them on single-pick entries instead. As it turned out one of those picks was the Packers so I still get to use that buyback, but the other entry was on the Bills. It would have been nice to use that buyback on one of the Seattle picks. Unfortunately, I got the allocation backwards. The entry with no margin left got the risky, crowded pick, and the one entry that could afford to gamble got a separate, unrelated pick instead. Live and learn.

I think there is a whole separate post I could do about matching your riskiest picks to whichever entries still have a buyback in reserve. I want to think through that concept a bit more before I post anything.

It's a long season, and I’m planning to enter a few new pools starting up over the next couple weeks, so I'll be adding entries back into the mix even after a week like this one.

Curious if anyone else got hit stacking the same team this week. How do you decide when to spread your picks out versus lean into one?

Here is my full Week 3 rundown:

Week 3 Results

Rough start if you were on the Chargers, Bucs, or Ravens. I'm still alive in 6 of my 9 pools.

Curious where folks stand. Do you still have a pulse? Who are you on for Week 3?

I'm starting to prepare for this season's survivor pools, and I'm hoping someone here has figured this out better than I have.

I played in 3 survivor pools last season and the mental load compounded fast once I got past a single pool. Pretty quickly I found that what I did in one pool made decisions for me in the others.

I'm curious how other people are handling multi-pool decision making. Do you use the same team everywhere for a given week or spread across different games? If you burn a big favorite in your high-stakes pool, do you still use them in the cheap one? And by midseason, are you tracking whether you've boxed yourself into a corner in one pool because of what you already used in another?

I've been doing this with spreadsheets for a couple years and it works, barely. But it gets unwieldy fast, especially when you're trying to think a few weeks ahead about who you have left. Some people I know just pick the same team everywhere and call it a day. Others handle each pool completely independently and accept the chaos.

Has anyone landed on a smarter approach, or found any tools that actually help with this beyond manual tracking?