Maximizing your edge in a football pool requires making pick decisions that optimally balance risk and reward. This article in our series on football pool strategy will dive into specific types of games you need to watch out for.

Better yet, we’ll share four specific examples from the NFL Week 1 slate.

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TeamRankings has provided data-driven picks, tools, and analysis for football and NCAA bracket pools since 2000. You can check out their NFL pick’em pool picks, NFL survivor pool picks, and algorithmic NFL betting picks.

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How To Make The Best NFL Week 1 Picks

Before we get to the picks, let’s quickly review what winning football pick’em pool strategy entails. At a high level, it involves doing two things right.

Assessing Your Current Context
Whether it’s NFL Week 1 or the last week of the season, the first thing you need to do before making picks is assess your pool situation. At any given point in time, your chance to win your football pool depends on a variety of factors, such as:

• Your current position in the standings
• Your pool’s payout structure
• How many weeks are left in the season
• The potential weekly scoring volatility made possible by your pool’s scoring system

Projecting Matchups & Opponent Picks
Second, you need to make sure you have two important pieces of data on every weekly NFL matchup: win odds and expected opponent pick popularity.

As we explained in an earlier post on football pool strategy, you can only win a football pick’em pool if you correctly pick games that your opponents get wrong.

That means gathering an accurate and precise prediction for each game is a must. However, that’s not enough.

You also need to anticipate how your opponents are going to pick each game, and adjust your own picks for maximum competitive advantage.

Together, all this knowledge — of context, win odds, and pick popularity — provides the foundation for crafting the best possible football pool picks, week in and week out.

Analysis Of 4 Potential NFL Week 1 Picks

As you process all of that data into actionable pick decisions, you can start to characterize certain types of picks based on their risk/reward profile.

Here are 4 types of picks, together with an example from the NFL Week 1 slate, that you must be able to identify:

1. The Big Favorite At A Reasonable Price

NFL Week 1 Pick Example: Buffalo over NY Jets
At post time, Buffalo was the biggest Vegas favorite of Week 1, by 9.5 points over the New York Jets. At those odds, Buffalo has about an 80% chance to win, while slightly over 90% of the public is picking them.

As a result, Buffalo is technically “overrated” in pick’em pools, since its popularity as a pick is greater than its chance to win. Is New York a smart upset pick, then, if you want to take a risk in Week 1?

Almost certainly not.

In most pools, that ~10% spread between pick popularity and win odds doesn’t provide much incentive to go out on a limb and make a big upset pick here. There are much better opportunities on the board. (Keep reading.)

2. The Value Favorite

NFL Week 1 Pick Example: LA Rams over Indianapolis
In pick’em pools, situations occasionally arise where a team that is expected to win its game (by objective or market-driven predictions, at least) is not the general public’s pick to win.

These games are the equivalent of pick’em pool gold, and with few exceptions, you should not let them pass by.

At post time, the Rams were 3.5 point Vegas favorites over Indianapolis, implying the Rams have over 60% win odds in this game. Yet less than 40% of entries in Yahoo!’s pick’em game are picking LA so far.

That makes Indianapolis a bad bet as far as winning your pool is concerned. You’d be taking on extra risk to pick them, and even if they do win, 60% of your pool is going to get the points too.

3. The Value Gamble

NFL Week 1 Pick Example: Seattle over Green Bay
Picks like these are risky and we would not advise them in many situations. In most season-long NFL pick’em pools, for example, you’re probably better off going with favored Green Bay (favored by 3 in Vegas at post time) — especially when it’s only Week 1 and you’ve got 16 more weeks of picks to make.

However, if your pool’s prize structure is centered more on weekly prizes than end-of-season prizes, then picking Seattle could be an excellent calculated gamble. Despite Seattle having a realistic 40% chance of winning, only 18% of the public is picking them.

The reward of winning points that 82% of your opponents miss is substantial, and the risk isn’t super-high. If you consistently exploit opportunities like these, you will win more weekly prizes than your opponents.

4. The Trendy Upset Pick

NFL Week 1 Pick Example: New Orleans Over Minnesota
With rare exceptions, if you’re going to make an upset pick, then you want it to offer a lot of value. As a general proxy, the more you get relentlessly mocked for making an upset pick, the better pick it probably is. That’s the spirit of a contrarian strategy.

By extension, you usually want to avoid making upset picks that are relatively popular in your pool. Typically there will be at least one alternative on the weekly slate that offers a better risk/reward tradeoff.

In NFL Week 1, for example, close to 50% of the public is picking New Orleans to upset Minnesota, which was favored by 3.5 at home at post time. At those odds, New Orleans only has about a 40% chance to win.

For the exact same “price,” you instead could pick Seattle, a team that also has a 40% chance to win. However, you would gain points on over 80% of your opponents if Seattle wins, vs. gaining points on just 50% of your opponents if you pick New Orleans and they win.

Of you could do a bit better than New Orleans on both the risk and the reward side. Miami, with 43% win odds as a 2.5 point home underdog at post time against Tampa Bay, is a slightly safer upset pick than New Orleans. And you’d still come out better if they win, gaining points on over 65% of your opponents.

Evaluating All Your NFL Week 1 Picks

Of course, when you make your Week 1 picks, you can’t just look at individual games in isolation. The 16 picks you make during NFL Week 1 are in effect a portfolio, and the overall risk/reward profile of the portfolio needs to be optimized for your specific pool’s characteristics.

We built our Football Pool Picks product to do all of this pick optimization work for you. It aggregates all the necessary data, such as objective game predictions and public picking trends, and automatically updates all that information multiple times per day.

Then, after you tell us the characteristics of your pool and your weekly context, it does all the math required to figure out the picks that maximize your chance to win a prize.

TeamRankings has provided data-driven picks, tools, and analysis for football and NCAA bracket pools since 2000. You can check out their NFL pick’em pool picks, NFL survivor pool picks, and algorithmic NFL betting picks.