Survivor is the easiest pool to host and the most brutal to play: pick one team a week to win, lose once and you're out, and you can't reuse a team. Here's the ten-minute setup that saves you a season of arguments.
Zero strikes = pure sudden death, fine for small crews. One or two strikes keeps a 20+ person pool alive into December instead of crowning a winner by Week 6. This is the single biggest lever you have.
Either picks lock at kickoff of each player's chosen game, or one global deadline at Thursday kickoff. Global-Thursday is simpler; per-game lets people use the whole slate. Pick one, write it down.
Auto-elimination or auto-assign the biggest favorite. Auto-elimination is cleaner and avoids "you gave him the Bills?!" fights — just remind the group every Wednesday.
An NFL tie isn't a loss. Standard rule: tie = survive. Decide now, not in Week 8 when it happens.
If your group plays for a prize, keep the money out of the tooling entirely — run the pool on chips and settle any prize privately. Cleaner for you, and you're not collecting cash like a bookie.
The classic survivor mistake is burning the best teams early. The sharper play is using good-enough favorites in the early weeks and saving elite teams for the mid-season stretch when the schedule tightens. Send your crew our survivor strategy guide and let them argue about it.
Survivor works from 6 to 600. Under ~10 people, skip strikes; over ~20, use one or two so the pool doesn't end by Halloween.
On ValueBet, no — free hosting, no per-entry fees. It's chip-based, so there's no cash on the platform at all.
Yes — run a Pick'em or Bankroll contest in the same club so knocked-out players still have something every Sunday.
Now. Pools filled before the season starts always out-recruit ones scrambling in Week 1 — people commit when there's runway.
Kickoff's coming. Set your survivor pool up today and spend September watching football, not spreadsheets.
Start your free survivor pool →