Pick one team a week to win. If they lose, you are out. You cannot pick the same team twice all season — and that last rule is the whole game.
Every week you pick one NFL team you think will win. If they win, you survive to the next week. If they lose, you are out of the pool for the rest of the season. The last person standing takes the pot.
It is also called an eliminator or a knockout pool, and it is not a pick’em: you are not picking every game, and the point spread does not come into it. Your team simply has to win.
Most pools count a tie as a loss, on the grounds that survivor asks for an outright win. A meaningful minority let it pass. Both are defensible and neither is standard, which is exactly why it needs writing down.
NFL ties are rare — a couple a season at most — so a pool can reach December before anyone notices the rule was never agreed. That is the worst moment to decide it, because by then somebody’s season depends on the answer.
Multiple entries make a pool last longer and raise the pot, and they change the game: somebody with five entries can cover five different teams and is playing a portfolio rather than making a call. Pools usually land on one of three:
A buyback lets somebody who has been eliminated pay again to get back in. It is the most common house rule in survivor and the one most often implemented badly, because it touches the prize pot. The conventions that hold up:
It happens, usually in a week where the favorites all go down at once. Two accepted answers: everybody eliminated that week splits the pot equally, or everybody survives and the week is replayed. The split is more common and far easier to administer.
The one thing that does not work is deciding afterwards. By then every person in the pool has a financial interest in a different answer.
Somebody will forget. The strict rule — a missed pick is an elimination — is the most common, and it is the one that keeps a pool moving, because chasing people is the job nobody signed up for.
The softer version assigns the week’s biggest favorite automatically. It keeps people in and it costs the commissioner nothing, but it has to be the rule from the start rather than a favor granted to whoever complains loudest.
An entry that missed week 1 has, strictly, already lost. So late entry only makes sense if the newcomer starts from the current week — and then they are playing a shorter, easier season than everybody else for the same money.
Most pools close entry at the first kickoff of week 1 and leave it there. If you do let people in late, say whether their pot share is the same, before they pay.
Whatever you decide, decide it in writing before anybody pays. Every one of these has ended a pool in an argument:
Pick Ninja runs all four survivor variants above, tracks used teams so nobody can pick a team twice by accident, locks each pick at its own kickoff, and eliminates automatically as results land. House rules you settle yourself go on the pool’s own rules page, where everybody can read them.
The pot is yours. We sell the software to the commissioner and never touch the money.