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NFL Survivor Football Pools

The Survivor Football Pool is the most popular format for the NFL. It's one of the easiest pools to play, but can be the toughest to win, especially in larger pools. Basically you just have to keep picking winners. Once you've picked a loser, you're eliminated from the pool. In a season with a lot of early upsets, there is a solid opportunity to run a 2nd pool in the same season.

The Survivor Football Pool is sometimes called an Eliminator Pool or Suicide Pool. If you flip the pool to pick losers instead of winners, it's often referred to as a Loser Pool (which is different from our Loser Football format).

Fun Fact: The Survivor Football Pool was our most popular football format in 2016 and 2017.

How to Play

  1. Entrants pick one team each week of the NFL regular season with the intention of the selection winning.
  2. If the team selected wins or ties, the entry survives to the following week.
  3. If the team selected loses, the entry is eliminated from the pool.
  4. If all remaining teams lose during a week, they all move on to the next week.
  5. The final surviving entry is the winner, unless there are multiple teams alive after Week 18.
  6. Teams may only be selected one time for the duration of the pool.

Options

Losers - Pick Losers instead of Winners to 'Survive'.

Default Picks - Choose from several options to assign a pick to an entry that doesn't make a selection prior to the deadline.

Strikes/Lives - Allow teams more than one 'loss' or 'strike' prior to them being eliminated.

Start Week - Want to start a 2nd chance survivor pool? Start a pool with the first pick some time after Week 1.

Create a New Survivor Football Pool Join an Existing Survivor Football Pool

Site News

  • Oct 1, 2026 - If you have names or entry names that show up as ??? on the site, please reach out and we can get those updated to what they should be. We have attempted to resolve the encoding issue that caused it, so hopefully it's not a problem going forward.
  • Sep 21, 2026 - It's shaping up to be one of those seasons with several Second Chance Survivor pools. Just a reminder, if you set up a 2nd pool of the same type with us in a season, we do offer a discount on the second pool.
  • Sep 20, 2026 - We've been working to make our Football update process more efficient this week - so that we can fully automate it going forward. We will be doing some spot checks after the 1pm games are updated to make sure everything is still working as expected. We're not expecting anything major as we've done some testing with fake leagues for Week 1, but if there are any issues, we will be working this afternoon to clean them up, so please hold off on messaging us until the late afternoon window is complete.
  • Sep 16, 2026 - Hockey is available for the 2026-2027 season! We opened it up a few days ago, and things are all ready to go.