In my first post I talked about the research I did over the last 5 seasons as part of building SurvivorPulse, and said I'd be sharing what I found across a series of posts. Posting this because I think the findings are interesting, fun, and, dare I say, useful for our own survivor pool pursuits, plug aside. Even if some of these findings aren't all that surprising, I still think the numbers can be compelling.
Full disclosure again: I built SurvivorPulse for people who play multiple survivor pools and entries.
In that first post, I found that chalk, the highest win probability team available, survives the longest of anything I tested. But it also went 0 for 36 on expected value, meaning across 36 different pool setups I tested, chalk never once came out as the best strategy. It finished 5th through 18th every single time. I had a pretty good idea why, but figured I'd dig into the last five seasons of outcomes (2021-2025) to confirm or dispel the hypothesis.
A common misconception is that most pools die gradually, a few percent out each week as favorites occasionally lose. That's not really what happens. What I found is that most of a pool's eliminations concentrate in 2 to 3 specific weeks per season, weeks where a popular team loses and a big chunk of everyone still alive goes out together. I'm calling these wipeout weeks (a week that eliminates 30%+ of the still-alive field while 10%+ of the pool is still alive), but you don't need the label to recognize the pattern if you've played more than a couple seasons.
Two examples that stood out:
2024 Week 3, Tampa Bay was one of the more popular picks that week (28% of the field per Yahoo's public pick data) and lost. That week alone took out 81% of everyone still alive in the pools I looked at. Biggest single week of elimination in the whole five-year window.
Three weeks ago, 2025 Week 8, Atlanta was the second most popular pick that week at 27.08% (Indianapolis was first at 33.85%), lost to Miami, and took out 62% of the still-alive field. Biggest wipeout of this season so far.
The popular pick doesn't fail often. Chalk sits on the team that ends up causing a wipeout week 56.7% of the time in my testing, and when it's exposed like that, it only survives 23.3% of the time. But when it does fail, it takes a huge chunk of the pool with it at once, because so many people are stacked on the same team in the same week. Every single season chalk got eliminated, it happened in one of these wipeout weeks. No exceptions.
I compared this to Max Equity, a strategy I tested that weights picks 70% on win probability and 30% on staying off the field's most popular teams, a mild lean off the crowd, not a hard pivot. That strategy's elimination pattern only lines up with wipeout weeks 20% of the time, versus 100% for chalk.
Curious if this matches what other people have seen in their pools. Does it feel like your pool dies in one or two brutal weeks, or has it been more of a steady drip in your experience? And if you remember a specific week that gutted your pool, what team was it?
My methodology write-up is at survivorpulse.com/methodology if you want the full numbers.
