Football Pool Strategy: How The Pros Dominate NFL Pick’ems & Office Pools (2020)

Many fantasy football players enjoy playing in football pick’em pools. These simple and fun contests involve predicting the winners of NFL and/or college football games for the chance to win a weekly or end-of-season prize.

What many people don’t realize is that in addition to being entertaining, football pick’em contests and office pools often present fantastic profit opportunities to players who understand how to maximize their edge.

In this post, now updated for 2020, we explain key strategy concepts that will give you an unfair advantage in football pick’em pools. These strategies are based on objective math, millions of computer simulations, and most importantly, the results of thousands of real-world football pick’em contests.

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How do we know these strategies work? Every football season, our customers put our pick recommendations to the test in their pools. Every year since 2014, an average of 72% of our subscribers have reported winning a prize in a football pick’em pool.

That level of success far exceeds expectations, and it’s all based on the concepts explained below. (To keep things simple, we’ll focus on NFL pools for this article, but the same concepts apply to college football pools as well.)

How Do NFL Pick’em Pools Work?

Before we get started, let’s explain in more detail what we mean by a football pick’em contest or office pool. 

In a pick’em pool, you play against other people, not against a “house” as with traditional sports betting. You can challenge your friends or coworkers in a private pool, or compete in a public contest sponsored by ESPN, a local bar, or a sportsbook.

In the most common type of NFL pick’em pool, you need to predict the winners (or point spread winners) of every NFL game over the course of the season. You also may need to assign confidence points to each of your picks; in that case, your reward for getting a pick right equals the number of confidence points you assigned to it. Many other variants exist.

Examples of popular public pick’em contests include ESPN’s Pigskin Pick’em, Yahoo!’s Pro Football Pick’em, and the popular SuperContest organized by the Westgate Las Vegas casino. You can set up your own private pool on sites like ESPN or Yahoo!, or run a highly customized private pool on a premium hosting site like RunYourPool.

No Vig, No Rake = More Profit Potential

The combination of a simple game and a peer vs. peer dynamic leads to one of the primary reasons why NFL pick’em pools can be great investments, and not just entertainment.

With traditional sports betting, the house (i.e. your sportsbook of choice) effectively extracts a commission, also known as the vig, for the honor of taking your bet. At many sportsbooks, you need to bet $11 to win $10 on popular types of bets (also known as -110 payout odds). At those payout odds, winning half of your sports bets still makes you a loser.

The result? The vast majority of traditional sports bettors are losers in the long term. Sports betting is fun, but it’s extremely tough as an investment — especially when your competition is an experienced house with a built-in edge.

Daily fantasy sports offers some advantages in comparison, primarily the opportunity to compete against less skilled human opponents. However, sites like DraftKings and FanDuel still take a hefty “rake” (commission) out of your contest entry fees, which decreases your expected returns.

NFL pools, on the other hand, may only give the pool administrator a relatively small fee for the work they do managing the pool. In addition, pools played in offices or among friends are often run by one passionate individual who will volunteer to administer the pool for free, in which case all entry fees get distributed as prize money to the pool’s winners.

If you’re a smart player, this dynamic is a big reason why you should enter as many NFL pools as you can reasonably can. NFL pick’em pools offer rare opportunities to earn outsized returns on your entry fees; no vig or rake plus the opportunity to compete against a bunch of flawed humans is a combination that’s hard to beat.

However, you still need to understand what it means to be a smart player.

The Not-Smart Way To Play NFL Pick’ems

Many people think winning an NFL pick’em contest is simply a question of figuring out the team that’s more likely to win each game. Then, you pick the favorites, with the exception of a few upset picks each week that you feel good about. After all, nobody ever wins by picking ALL favorites! Finally, cross your fingers and hope you get lucky on those upset picks.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. That approach will rarely maximize your odds to win an NFL pick’em pool.

Becoming a long term football pool winner requires a higher level of analysis. First, there is no reliable and simple “golden rule” for making picks for a pick’em contest. The mix of favorites and upsets that you pick each week should depend on a number of important contextual factors about your pool. 

Second, winning a pick’em pool isn’t just about evaluating risk. Instead, you need to consider both the risk and the potential reward of every pick you make. In some weeks and in some types of pools, picking all the favorites may actually be your best strategy. In other weeks and in other types of pools, going completely upset-crazy might make a lot of sense.

Next-Level Strategy In Pick’em Pools

There are a number of contextual factors about your NFL pick’em contest that you should consider as you make picks each week. The primary examples include:

1. The number of entries in your pool
2. Your pool’s rules and scoring system
3. Your pool’s prize structure
4. Your current position in the standings
5. The number of picks/weeks left in the pool

Many pick’em players don’t realize the extent to which these factors can impact their odds to win a pool. If you understand why these factors matter, and how they should influence your decision to pick the favorite or the underdog in each specific game, you’ll have a huge edge over most of your pool opponents.

We’ll examine some of these factors at the end of this article, but first, let’s talk about evaluating both risk and reward with your pool picks.

Good Predictions Are Important, But Not Enough

These days, it’s pretty easy to estimate the chance that an NFL team wins or loses an upcoming game.

With a few clicks of your mouse, you can get high-quality game predictions that are either market-driven (e.g. sportsbook odds) or data-driven (e.g. algorithmic predictions from sites like TeamRankings or FiveThirtyEight). Averaging a team’s win odds or implied win odds from several reliable prediction sources can often improve prediction accuracy even more.

As long as you’re willing to put in the work week after week, you can develop a solid and objective knowledge of which teams are favored and how likely they are to win.

The question then becomes, what do you do with that knowledge?

Of course, you could just pick the more likely winner of every game, maybe tossing your favorite coin for the matchups your research indicates are basically even. If your pool uses confidence points, you could then simply rank your picks by the win odds or point spread information you’ve collected, and be done with it.

We’re not gonna lie: A basic strategy like that, as long as it’s grounded in good data, should do pretty well at keeping you out of the cellar of most NFL pools. In most years, it’s likely to result in a very respectable finish in the standings.

However, it’s almost never a sophisticated enough plan to maximize your odds to win.

The main issue is that in pick’em pools, all correct picks aren’t equal. Getting a specific pick right may be reason to celebrate — or it may hardly be worth anything to you. You need to figure out how to make the picks that provide the highest expected boost to your odds to win the pool, and that requires more than just good game predictions.

You Need To Differentiate Your Pool Entry To Win

Many NFL pick’em players don’t seem to understand that there is only one way to win a picking contest against a bunch of other opponents. In short, you need to get some picks right that your opponents get wrong.

By definition, that is the only way to rise above a competitor in the pool standings, and it implies two things:

• To give yourself the best chance to win, at some point you will likely need to pick against the collective wisdom of your pool opponents.
• In most cases, getting a pick right that all of your opponents also get right does nothing to improve your odds to win the pool.*

(*Some exceptions exist. If you’re defending a lead in a pool with only a week or two left, for example, matching the picks of your closest opponents makes it impossible for them to gain ground on you, and can be a great strategy.)

For example, if you pick Kansas City to beat Houston in Week 1 of the 2020 NFL season, and you get that pick right, don’t pat yourself on the back. According to public picking trends data we collect, an expected 97% of the rest of your pool also will have picked the Chiefs.

Sure, getting a pick right is still better than getting it wrong. Just be aware that your odds to win a prize in your pool will have barely budged if the Chiefs win.

Get a pick right that few people in your pool happen to make, though, and you can shoot up the pool leaderboard.

The Implications For Upset Picks

This “risk vs. reward” driven thinking should have a big influence on your approach for making upset picks in your NFL pick’em. Some upset picks are much smarter gambles than others in pick’em pools, and it all depends on what your opponents are likely to do.

For instance, if you go out on a limb and pick 3.5-point underdog Green Bay over Minnesota as your big upset pick of Week 1, from a risk/reward perspective, the joke is almost certainly on you.

Why? Because based on national picking trends, nearly half of the public is going with Green Bay in pick’em pools. So if you’re lucky enough to be right, and your pool reflects the national averages, you’ll score points that about half of your opponents miss.

That may sound good — until you realize that Atlanta is only a 1-point underdog against Seattle, yet not even 25% of the public is picking the Falcons to win. In comparison to Green Bay, Atlanta offers both less risk and a significantly higher reward if the pick is correct.

So if you’re dead set on making a single upset pick in 2020 NFL Week 1, picking Green Bay when a team with Atlanta’s profile is also an option would be silly. Granted, going with Green Bay is not going to make a huge negative impact in comparison, and there’s always the chance that the Packers win and the Falcons lose. But simply choosing Green Bay as your upset pick instead of Atlanta reduces your odds to win your pool, assuming that picking trends in your pool reflect national averages.

In addition, over the course of a full season and hundreds of picks to make, the cumulative negative impact of suboptimal individual decisions like these can quickly add up to something significant enough to keep you off the winner’s podium.

How The Pros Win NFL Football Pools

The Atlanta/Green Bay example above illustrates an important aspect of NFL pick’em strategy that many players don’t understand or apply: game theory.

Sharp NFL pick’em players do more than try to figure out the most likely team to win. They work just as hard to understand how their pool opponents are thinking, and how their opponents are likely to make picks. This process typically involves reviewing pick popularity data published by national pick’em contests, to help project how their opponents are likely to act.

(FYI, you can find public picking trends data in the Data Grid feature of our Football Pick’em Picks product.)

Then, the most serious pros also consider pool-specific biases they might be able to exploit. If you’re in one pool full of New England fans, for example, you should be looking to pick against the Patriots more often in that pool than in other pools.

Applying this level of opponent reconnaissance to your pick making can greatly increase your expected pool profits.

Here Come The Beatles: An NFL Pool Example

Now let’s get back to that list of five contextual strategy factors for pick’em pools that we mentioned earlier. We’ll use a simplified example to illustrate how one particular factor, the number of entries in your pool, can influence your optimal picking strategy.

(Full warning, numbers ahead.)

The Beatles Pool Rules

With Week 1 of the 2020 NFL season coming up, good friends John, Paul, George and Ringo are excited to compete in their annual “Gridiron Fields Forever” NFL pick’em pool.

Here’s how it works:

• Each player gets one entry
• Buy-in is $100 per entry
• The winner takes home the entire $400 prize pot
• If multiple players tie for first, they draw straws to determine the winner

The rules are simple: You pick straight up game winners, with one point awarded per correct pick. However, the pool lasts just one week, and only includes the following three games:

• Houston at Kansas City
• NY Jets at Buffalo
• Green Bay at Minnesota

Game Win Odds

Although the Fab Four all have their own opinions on these games, objective win probabilities looked roughly like this at publication time:

How The Beatles Picked

When the pick deadline arrived, here’s what all the picks looked like by player. Win odds are listed in parentheses, while upset picks are bolded:

Player Pick Summary

Reviewing these picks, here’s what you should notice:

• John went with an ultra conservative strategy, picking all three favorites.
• Paul and George each made one upset pick, but neither had the guts to pick against the Chiefs.
• Ringo, the fiercely independent free thinker, picked all three underdogs.

So who made the best picks?

The Expected Pool Winner Is…

Do the math, and John made the best picks.

By playing it safe and picking all favorites in such a tiny pool, he let his opponents shoot themselves in the foot by picking too aggressively, giving himself a 42% chance to win the pool in the process (compared to baseline win odds of 1-in-4, or 25%).

As a result, John’s expected payout is $168 (the $400 pot times a 42% chance to win) for an expected return of 68% on his $100 buy-in fee. Warren Buffett would be jealous.

Paul has a 28% chance to win the pool, George has a 19% chance, and reckless Ringo only has a 10% chance.

At those pool win odds, Paul still has a positive expected return on investment (ROI) of 13% on his pool entry fee, but George and Ringo are expected to lose money.

The Takeaway: Small-Pool Strategy

Let’s trace this simplified lesson back to game theory.

In a very small pick’em pool, in which you only need to beat a handful of opponents, taking even moderate risks with upset picks can be too aggressive of a strategy, and will likely decrease your odds to win the pool.

Picking all favorites may look wimpy and draw the mockery of your peers, but in some cases it still makes the most sense.

Pool Twist #1: Paul The Copycat

In the example above, John is in the driver’s seat with his all-favorites picks, but a big reason why is because he was the only player in the pool to pick all the favorites.

What if Paul hadn’t picked Green Bay to upset Minnesota, and had instead picked all favorites, exactly duplicating John’s picks?

In that case, the best outcome John could hope for would be to tie Paul for the highest score in the pool, and then to win the 50/50 straw draw to take home the pot. That change in dynamic immediately decreases John’s expected pool profits.

In this new scenario, John and Paul would both have a 32% chance to win the pool, and an expected ROI of 28%. George and Ringo would both be slightly better off than before, since any upset happening would now ruin the possible perfect scores of two opponents and not just one, but they are both still expected to lose money.

John’s profit prospects decrease if another player ends up making the same ultra-conservative picks, but playing it safe still gives him the best expected return of anyone in the pool (tied with Paul)!

Pool Twist #2: Add 396 Friends

Something fun happens when you significantly expand the pool’s size, though.

Let’s now imagine a pool with not four entries, but 400 entries: the Fab Four and 396 of their biggest fans. The contest remains winner take all, with the same games to pick.

In a pool of that size, an expected pick distribution might look something like this:

• 200 players pick like John (all 3 favorites)
• 100 players pick like Paul (2 favorites, 1 minor upset)
• 90 players pick like George (2 favorites, 1 moderate upset)
• 10 players pick like Ringo (all 3 underdogs)

Now which Beatle would have made the best picks for this 400-entry pool?

The Highest Expected Profit Now Goes To…

Ringo and his like-minded followers, by a significant margin.

In bigger pools, public bias toward favorites often presents outsized opportunities to increase your expected pool profits by aggressively picking unpopular (and typically fairly risky) teams.

You just need to have the guts to trust the expected value calculations, and ignore the inevitable ridicule of your opponents who think your picks look crazy and dumb.

Why It Often Pays To Be Aggressive In Bigger Football Pools

By picking all underdogs, Ringo and friends still only have a 21% chance to end up in a ten-way tie for the highest score in the 400-person pool. All 390 other players have a better chance of getting the highest score, which makes sense, because all three upsets actually happening is the least likely outcome.

But here’s the kicker. When an unlikely outcome does occur (e.g. two or three upsets) and Ringo ends up with the highest score in pool, he and the players who picked like him each have somewhere between a 1-in-10 chance (if all 3 underdogs win) and a 1-in-200 chance (if the biggest favorite wins, but the other two underdogs pull off upsets) of winning the pool.

In comparison, the best possible chance that anyone who picked like John has of winning the pool is 1-in-200 (if all three favorites win), since 200 people picked exactly like John. These people have the best chance of getting the highest score in the pool, but their odds to actually win a prize are then torpedoed by having to edge out a huge number of people who made similar picks.

Calculate out all the possible outcomes and probabilities, and each person that picked like Ringo has a 0.37% chance to win the 400-entry pool and take home the $40,000 pot. Over the long term, these people should expect an average of $48 in profit from their $100 entry fee (0.37% times $40,000 equals $148 in expected winnings).

That’s tops for all players, and an expected average return of almost 50%.

 When Boom or Bust Beats Playing It Safe

In a larger pool, playing it relatively safe with your picks often conveys a false sense of hope. Most years, a conservative player will get a higher score than a riskier player, and end up finishing decently in the final standings.

Unfortunately, even finishing in the 90th percentile of a 400-person contest (e.g. around 40th place) usually wins you nothing.

Typically, you either need to win the pool or finish in the top few places to profit big. In large pools, making more unpopular and risky picks tends to accomplish that goal more often — even if that strategy likely will bomb in the years when it doesn’t do very well.

Other Contextual Pick’em Strategy Factors

The Beatles pool illustrates how one contextual factor, the size of your pool, can impact optimal picking strategy in NFL pick’em contests.

Before we wrap up, let’s briefly review the implications of some other strategy factors. You can visit TeamRankings.com in the upcoming weeks to read more detailed content on these topics.

Confidence Points. In confidence pools, we often see players making multiple upset picks with low confidence points. That strategy can be self-defeating, in bigger pools and single-week pools especially. In short, you may be taking on a bunch of extra risk without maximizing the possible rewards; the more upset picks you make, the more luck you need to get all or most of them right. From an expected value perspective, it can be better to consolidate your risk on your smartest upset pick or two, and make a bigger gamble on those more selective picks in terms of confidence points.

Point Spread Pools. It’s harder to pick against a point spread, since you will rarely have more than a 55-60% chance of getting any given pick right. (If you think you can do better than that over the long term, you should quit your job and become a professional sports bettor, but we don’t recommend it!) However, point spreads also serve as the “great equalizer” in NFL pick’em pools, because even the most clueless player suddenly has a not-that-much-worse chance than the sharpest player in the pool to get any given pick right. In general, pool players seem to greatly underestimate the impact of luck in winning a spread-based pick’em pool.

Pool Length / Total Number Of Picks. The more games included in your NFL pick’em pool, the less likely it is that luck plays a major role in the outcome. If you think you have a skill advantage over your pool opponents, playing in a season-long, “pick every game every week” pool will likely give you a bigger edge than playing selectively in single week contests or in a “Pick Five” or “Pick Six” contest like the Westgate SuperContest. Any stiff off the street has a shot against the sharpest NFL picker in the world in a 3-game picking contest; not so much in a 250-game contest.

Season Prizes vs. Weekly Prizes. The picks that maximize your odds to have the highest score in one particular week will often be riskier than the picks that give you the best chance to contend for an end-of-season prize. In short, if you only care about winning weekly prizes, it opens up opportunities to take more aggressive value-driven risks, since if things don’t pan out you’ll have a clean slate the next week anyway. As a result, playing optimally in a pool that offers both weekly and end-of-season prizes often requires you to decide which type of prize you primarily want to target with each of your entries.

Early Season vs. Endgame Strategy. In most season-long NFL pick’em pools, it pays not to get too aggressive too early, and you shouldn’t overreact to a bad week by abandoning a proven long-term picking strategy. You’ve got 17 weeks of picking to do, and the timing of your good vs. bad weeks (and of your opponents’ good vs. bad weeks) is unpredictable. You’re almost certainly not out of it if you’re only in the middle of the pack after Week 3, for instance, thanks to some early bad luck on your part plus good luck by some of your competitors. Later in the season, though, your relative position in the standings may require more aggressive moves if time is running out.

The Takeaways

If you’ve made it this far, you either have enjoyed what you’ve read, or you have way too much free time on your hands. Thanks either way! As you can hopefully tell, we take football pools seriously.

We hope this article helped you think about NFL pick’em contest strategy in a more sophisticated manner, or that it at least shed some light on an aspect of picking strategy you may not yet have considered.

With that said, unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and some solid math and coding chops, it is a big challenge to apply all of these strategy angles to your football pick’em week in and week out. Maximizing your edge in a football pool takes a whole lot of data and math, and it’s pretty much impossible to do it by hand (or with Excel, for that matter).

The TeamRankings Solution

As geeky engineer types, our solution to winning more NFL pick’em pools was to build technology to do all the heavy lifting to identify the smartest pool picks on a case-by-case basis.

Over the past decade, we’ve developed and refined algorithms that customize pick recommendations for NFL pick’em pools. Our technology first asks you for some information about each of your pools, then delivers pick recommendations for each one based on the dynamics that impact optimal strategy.

We call this product Football Pick’em Picks, and its features include:

• Betting market odds and objective game predictions.
• National pick popularity data and opponent pick projections.
• Weekly recommended picks based on factors like your scoring system, prize structure, and position in the standings.
• Support for game winner or point spread based pools.
• Support for flat scoring, confidence pools, and “Pick Six” style pools.
• Pick optimization for end-of-season prizes or weekly prizes.

Most importantly, the product works. Over the past six years, our subscribers have reported winning prizes in season-long football pools more than 3 times as often as one would expect, given the size of their pools.

Winning a football pool in any given year will always require some luck. Even if you’re the most skilled player in the pool, you’re going to lose a lot more pools than you win. That’s just the reality of competing against lots of people.

In the long term, though, the occasional wins enjoyed by sharp players more than make up for the losses. If you have the patience, NFL pick’em pools offer fantastic profit opportunities, and our Football Pick’em Picks product provides the data and analysis you need to have a shot at a title year in and year out. As we hear from many of our subscribers, your opponents will be wondering what your secret sauce is!

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