How to Run a Survivor Pool
A commissioner's checklist, from choosing the rules to crowning the last entry standing.
Setting up a survivor pool takes about ten minutes. Running it well comes down to a handful of decisions; make those decisions before you send the invite, and the season mostly runs itself.
This guide walks through them in the order you'll meet them. What each rule means for entrants, from ties to total wipeouts, is covered in Survivor Pool Rules, Explained.
Step 1: Choose the sport and the schedule
NFL survivor is the classic: one pick a week for 18 weeks, from a board of 32 teams. It's the easiest version to explain to people who have never played.
Other sports change the rhythm. College football survivor has more than 130 FBS teams, so commissioners often narrow the board to one conference or the AP Top 25. MLB, NBA and NHL survivor run in weekly periods where a pick covers a team's whole week, which makes reading the schedule as important as picking the better team. March Madness and World Cup survivor fit a whole pool into a few weeks.
In the NFL you can also choose a 20-period schedule, which splits the Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks into two shorter periods each, the way the Circa Survivor contest does. It gives entrants two more chances to be eliminated. And you choose the starting period, so a pool organized in Week 3 doesn't have to pretend Weeks 1 and 2 happened.
Step 2: Decide what counts as a correct pick
Most pools pick winners: choose a team, and it has to win. NFL, college football and March Madness pools can use either of two alternatives instead:
- Losers. Pick a team to lose. It reads like the same game backwards, but it plays differently: you're hunting mismatches from the other side, and a bad team's surprise win is what knocks you out.
- Against the spread. Your team has to cover the point spread. That takes the obvious picks away, because a 13-point favorite now has to win by 14. Spreads can be static, set once and fixed for the week, or live, following the betting market until an entrant confirms a pick, which then can't be changed.
Decide how a tie counts, too. The Tie Rule grades a tie as either a loss or a win. NFL ties are rare, but a rare event with no rule is exactly how a pool ends up in an argument. In a spread pool, you'll decide how to score pushes (ties against the spread), or to use the Force Hooks setting to avoid the possibility of pushes altogether by moving any whole-number spread half a point up or down.
Step 3: Decide how forgiving the pool is
A one-life pool is the purest version, and the shortest. Every wrong pick ends someone's season, which is great drama in a pool of 100 and a short season in a pool of 12. Extra lives keep more people playing for longer. As a rough guide, the smaller the group, the more forgiving the pool should be.
Extra lives can be free, or cost a rebuy fee:
- Free extra lives are automatic. An entry with lives left simply stays in the pool after a loss.
- Paid rebuys ask the entrant to choose. After losing a life, they buy back in before the rebuy deadline (or turn on auto-rebuys ahead of time), or they're eliminated. If you'd rather handle rebuys yourself, Commissioner Controlled rebuys hand that job to you.
You can also end the rebuy period after a set week. From then on every remaining entry is down to one life, which keeps the end of the season from dragging. Finally, decide what happens if every remaining entry loses in the same week. The standard Total Wipeout rule makes them all co-champions; the alternative revives them with one life each and plays on.
Step 4: Set team re-use, picks per week and entries
- Max team usage. The default is once per season, which is what turns survivor into a season-long puzzle. Allow two or more uses per team, or unlimited, for a more forgiving pool.
- Max opponent usage. Caps how many times an entrant can pick against the same team, so nobody spends the whole season fading the league's worst defense.
- Selections per week. Requiring two picks a week makes the pool harder, because both have to win. You can set a different number for particular weeks, too.
- Max entries. How many separate entries one person may run. Each entry has its own picks, lives and team usage. Two or three is common in larger pools.
Step 5: Plan for the missed pick
Someone will forget. Without insurance, a missed pick costs a life just like a wrong one, and getting knocked out in September for forgetting is the elimination people stay annoyed about longest.
Insurance fills a missed pick automatically, with the most popular pick in the pool that the entrant still has available, or a random eligible team. With no fee, every entrant is covered automatically. Set a fee, and entrants opt in individually, with their payments recorded in the pool's finances. You can also cap how many insurance picks an entry may use in a season, or switch insurance off after a set week. Pick reminder emails help too.
Step 6: Choose when picks lock
A pick always locks by its own game's start at the latest. On top of that, a pool can use a single weekly deadline or a custom lock time of your choosing. A pick whose game starts before the weekly deadline, such as a Thursday night game, still locks at that game's kickoff.
Per-game locks are the friendliest for entrants, who can wait for injury news. A single weekly deadline means everyone commits before the week begins. If your group takes a week off, you can mark that period to skip scoring entirely.
Step 7: Settle the money question before Week 1
A pool doesn't need money to run. If yours plays for something, agree on the buy-in, any rebuy and insurance fees, how the pot is split, and when people pay, before anyone makes a pick.
ALA never collects buy-ins or pays out prizes. What it provides is finance tracking: a ledger of what each entrant owes and has paid, including rebuys and insurance fees, so it doesn't live in a spreadsheet on your laptop. Setting a pool's buy-in to $0 will disable the finance tools. Whether and how your group plays for money is up to your group and the laws where you live.
ALA's own charge is separate and is paid by the commissioner alone. Creating a pool is free; one software fee per pool, priced by its number of entries, is due 7 days after the pool starts. Entrants never pay ALA. The details are on the pricing page.
Step 8: Invite your group
Every pool on ALA belongs to a group, which you can create while you set up the pool. Share the invite link and people join from there. The group keeps each member's record across all of its pools and seasons, so next year's pool starts with some history.
Each pool also has its own How To Play page, which lists the rules your settings create, so you don't have to write them up. Settings can be changed up to the pool's start date. After that, treat the rules as fixed.
During the season
Results come in from live scores, so eliminations, lives and standings update without anyone grading picks by hand, and live scoreboards show how every pick is doing while games are on. Your job is mostly communication: the pool's message board and email tools reach everyone at once, and Commish Tools let you fix the occasional mistake, such as an entrant's pick made on the wrong team.
The commissioner's checklist
- Sport, schedule and starting period chosen.
- Pick rule (winners, losers or spread) and tie rule decided.
- Lives, rebuys, rebuy deadline and the wipeout rule set.
- Team usage, picks per week and max entries set.
- Insurance decided.
- Lock time chosen.
- Buy-in, fees, payouts and payment dates agreed, or the buy-in set to $0.
- Invite link sent, with the pool's How To Play page.
Every setting in that list, for every sport and format, is described on the pool settings page, and defined in the glossary.
Keep reading
Ready to set one up? Create a pool. Creating one is free, and the commissioner's pool fee is due 7 days after the pool starts.