Format guide
One pick a week. The team you pick has to win outright, and once you have used a team you can never use it again. Lose once and your season is over — the field thins every week until somebody is the last one standing.
Survivor runs on the NFL and on College Football — either on its own, or both on one sheet. Play is for dits, an in-app currency — never for real money.
The format
A survivor pool inverts pick’em. Instead of picking every game you pick exactly one — a single team you believe wins its game outright this week. Get it right and you are still alive. Get it wrong and you are finished for the season.
The rule that turns it into a game rather than a weekly coin flip is the second one: once you have used a team, that team is spent. Ride the best team in the league in week one and you cannot touch them again in December. Everybody starts with the same board — thirty-two teams in an NFL pool, and a far bigger one in a College Football pool — and burns it down at their own pace, which is why two players can both be alive in week ten with completely different problems in front of them.
A tie counts as a loss — survivor has no push. Not picking counts as a loss too: an empty sheet at the deadline eliminates you exactly as if you had picked the worst team on the board, and it is by some distance the most common way people go out.
What ends a run
Eliminated
Your pick had to win outright, so a one-point loss and a shutout end your season identically. There is no spread to hide behind here.
Eliminated
A tie is not a win, so it is a loss. This is the rule every group argues about in the one week per decade it matters, and Pooldit settles it the same way every time.
Eliminated
An empty sheet is graded as a loss. This is the one that actually kills people, and the one autopick exists to prevent.
You survive
A game that was never played cannot knock anybody out, so you survive the week outright — and your team is handed back to you unspent, still available for a later week.
That last row is worth reading twice. A postponed or cancelled game does not burn your one use of that team, which makes it the only place in the whole format where a pick can effectively be taken back.
Strategy
Because every team is a one-use resource, survivor is a season-long allocation problem wearing a weekly disguise. The naive line is to take the biggest favourite on the board every week. That works beautifully until about week six, at which point you have burned the four teams you were going to need in November and you are staring at a card full of coin flips while everyone else still has ammunition.
The counter-line is to spend the *smallest* favourite you are actually comfortable with each week and bank the strong teams for the weeks the schedule goes thin. You trade a little safety now for a lot of optionality later, which is why survivor rewards the player who reads the whole season’s schedule over the player who reads this week’s odds.
Live odds matter here in a way they do not in pick’em, because you only get one shot: Pooldit shows how the lines have moved since your pool’s lines were posted, so a team drifting the wrong way all week is visible to you before you commit your single pick to it.
Worked example
Forty players start. In week one, thirty-one of them take the same heavy home favourite and it wins comfortably; the other nine spread across three games, and two of those lose. Thirty-eight alive.
Week two looks safe and is not. A road favourite loses outright and takes fourteen players with it in a single afternoon. Twenty-four alive. Week three is the quiet one — everybody left picks a different game, and only three go out. Twenty-one alive.
Week four is where the first rule and the second rule collide. The two best matchups on the board belong to teams that eleven of the twenty-one survivors already used in weeks one and two, so those eleven simply cannot take them. They take the third-best game instead, it ends in a tie, and eleven seasons end at once on a result nobody had a strong opinion about. Ten alive.
That is the shape of every survivor pool: long flat stretches punctuated by one week that halves the field, and an ending that arrives faster than anybody expects. Forty players is usually down to a handful inside twelve weeks.
The Thursday problem
Survivor’s cruellest property is that doing nothing is fatal. Forget the Thursday game, forget you are in the pool at all, be on a plane — the outcome is identical to picking the worst team on the board. Every survivor pool that has ever run has lost somebody this way, and they are always furious about it.
Pooldit’s autopick agents close that hole. Set a strategy once — take the favourite, take the underdog, take the home side, take the away side, or a straight coin flip — and when your window closes on an empty sheet, the agent fills it. Crucially, it fills from the teams you have not used yet: an autopick can never spend a team you already burned, and it stops filling entirely once you are eliminated.
One honest limit worth knowing before you rely on it: survivor takes the basic strategies and the coin flip only. The freeform custom-agent builder — the one where you describe the conditions you believe in and Pooldit picks to them — is not offered for this format.
Commissioner setup
Survivor runs on the NFL and on College Football. Pick one when you create the pool, or tick both and run a single sheet across Saturday and Sunday — one pick a week either way, and a team you have used is used for the season no matter which league it came from. Those are the only two leagues offered: the elimination rule needs a sport where a drawn game is a once-a-season curiosity rather than a quarter of all results, which is why soccer leagues are not offered for it — a draw would have to eliminate everybody who picked either side, and that is a product decision nobody should make by accident.
The other structural difference is that survivor has no weekly winner and no weekly pot at all, so there is no weekly prize split to configure and no weekly tiebreaker to choose. Everything rides to the end, and the end has three shapes:
Winner take all
If exactly one player is still alive when the season ends, they take the whole pot outright. This is the ending everybody signs up for.
Even split
If the season runs out before the field narrows to one, everyone still standing splits the pot evenly.
Last one out
If a single week wipes the whole field, the pot goes to whoever lasted longest — the players eliminated in that final week share it. A survivor pool cannot end with nobody paid.
Who it is for
Survivor suits a group that wants a season-long story with a single ending. It costs almost nothing to play — one pick, thirty seconds a week — and it generates more conversation per unit of effort than anything else here, because everybody’s position is legible to everybody else at a glance.
It is the wrong call on its own for a group that wants everyone involved in December. Half your players will be spectators by Halloween, and somebody who goes out in week two has nothing to do for four months. Plenty of groups run survivor alongside a second pool for exactly that reason: a pick’em pool keeps the eliminated players in something, and a confidence pool gives the survivors somewhere to argue.
How a pick’em pool works · How a confidence pool works · Pool types that keep everyone playing into December
Each week you pick exactly one team that you think will win its game outright. If your team wins, you survive to the next week; if it loses you are eliminated for the rest of the season. You can never pick the same team twice, so every team is a single-use resource you spend down over the season. The pool runs until one player is left, and that is the whole game.
No. Once you have used a team, it is gone for the rest of your run, and the pick sheet marks it as used so you cannot pick it by accident. There is one exception: if the game your pick was in gets postponed or cancelled, it was never played, so it neither eliminates you nor burns your use of that team — the team goes straight back into your available pool.
A tie eliminates you. Survivor asks your team to win outright, and there is no push or throw-out in this format, so a drawn game counts as a loss for everybody who picked either side. This is also the reason survivor pools are offered on the NFL and College Football rather than on soccer leagues, where draws are common enough to make elimination arbitrary. College football has no ties at all, so the rule almost never bites there.
An empty sheet is graded as a loss and eliminates you, which is the most common way players go out. Autopick agents exist to prevent exactly that: set a strategy once — favourite, underdog, home, away or a coin flip — and Pooldit fills your pick when your window closes, choosing only from teams you have not already used. The freeform custom-agent builder is not offered for survivor pools.
The pot goes to whoever lasted longest — the players who were eliminated in that final week share it evenly. A survivor pool never ends with nobody paid. If instead the season simply runs out while more than one player is still alive, everyone still standing splits the pot evenly, and if exactly one player is alive at the end they take all of it.
The NFL and College Football. You can run either league on its own, or tick both and take one pick a week across the combined slate — with the once-per-season team rule applying across both, so a team you spend on Saturday is gone on Sunday too. Survivor is the one format on Pooldit with a league restriction, and it is enforced rather than merely suggested — the league picker will not offer MLB, the CFL, soccer or the NFL preseason for a survivor pool, and the server refuses them too. Every other format, including pick’em, confidence and allowance, can be run on any league Pooldit supports or on a hybrid mix of several.
Get started
Survivor pools are open and free to run through October; from November 1, commissioners will pay $5 a month, and playing in a pool you are invited to stays free for everybody. Pools play for dits, an in-app currency that keeps score of whatever your group already agreed on in the real world. Pooldit never takes, holds or moves real money — there is nothing to deposit here and nothing to cash out.
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