How to run an NFL loser pool

Survivor, upside down: every week you pick one team to lose, and you can never use that team again. Simple to explain, brutal to survive, and it makes every bad team on the schedule worth watching.

Start free →About Survivor & Loser pools

Free plan · you keep 100% · Office organizers, booster clubs & commissioners · 6 min read

A loser pool — you’ll also hear reverse survivor or anti-survivor — takes the format everyone already knows and inverts the one thing that matters. Instead of picking a team to win each week, you pick a team to lose. Get it right and you move on; if your team pulls off the upset, you’re done. No team can be used twice, which is what turns an apparently trivial pool into a season-long strategy problem: the league only has so many bad teams, and everyone is trying to spend them at the right moment.

Why it works

The pool that saves your worst weeks

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The bad teams finally matter

A normal pool makes half the schedule irrelevant by October. In a loser pool the 2-9 teams are the whole game — every blowout you didn’t watch is suddenly the most important result of the week.

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Much harder than it sounds

Burn the worst team in the league in Week 1 and you have nothing left in December. Everyone underestimates it, which is exactly why it lasts — and why the pot usually survives deep into the season.

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The perfect second pool

It runs on the same entries, the same weeks and the same money rules as your survivor pool, so an organizer already running one can add this with no new work — and sell a second entry to the same crowd.

Set it up

Four steps to kickoff

Create a Survivor pool

Start a Survivor contest and switch the mode to Loser Pool. Everything else — weeks, entries, deadlines — works exactly as it does in a normal survivor pool.

Set the rules

Strikes or sudden death, whether a tie counts as a loss, one entry or several per person, and the pick deadline (first kickoff, each game’s own kickoff, or a named slot like Thursday Night).

Share one link

Players join, pick a team to lose, and can’t reuse it. Picks can stay hidden until lock so nobody copies the sharp entry.

Let it score itself

The NFL schedule loads with one click and results score automatically from live scores — losing picks advance, winning picks are eliminated, standings update without you.

Strategy

Why nobody wins this easily

The instinct is to take the league’s worst team every week until you run out. The problem is that you run out. Use the four obvious teams in the first month and the back half of your season is spent picking mediocre teams on the road and hoping.

The other trap is the bye week. The team you were saving for Week 11 isn’t playing in Week 11, and the week you were counting on quietly disappears from your plan. Good entries map their picks across the whole schedule before Week 1, then adjust as teams turn out better or worse than expected.

And the field matters. When half the pool fades the same hopeless team, one upset takes out most of the pool at once — so the winning move is often a slightly worse pick that nobody else made.

FAQ

Loser pools, answered

What is an NFL loser pool?

A loser pool — also called a reverse survivor or anti-survivor pool — flips the survivor format. Each week every entry picks one team they think will LOSE. If that team loses, the entry advances; if it wins, the entry is eliminated. You cannot reuse a team all season, and the last entry standing takes the pot.

How is it different from a survivor pool?

Only the result you need is different. Survivor asks you to pick a winner; a loser pool asks you to pick a loser. Same weekly cadence, same no-reuse rule, same last-one-standing ending. Running both at once is common — the same players enter each and they play completely differently.

Isn’t it easy? Just pick the worst team.

That is the trap. There are only so many terrible teams and you can use each one exactly once, so spending the league’s worst team on Week 2 leaves you picking coin-flips in December. Bye weeks, upsets, and everyone else fading the same team make it a genuine strategy game.

Does a tie eliminate you?

Your call. Ties are rare but they happen, so the commissioner decides up front whether a tie counts as a loss (you advance) or as “not a loss” (you’re out). Set it before Week 1 and it applies all season.

Can I run it against the spread instead?

Yes. The same pool can be run against the spread, where a pick has to cover rather than simply win or lose. The line is frozen at a moment you choose (Wednesday noon ET by default) and cannot move afterwards, so every entry is graded against the same number no matter when they picked.

What happens when someone gets knocked out in Week 3?

Turn on the Second Chance bracket and anyone eliminated from the main pool is entered automatically into a side pool that starts over — no extra buy-in and no work for you. The last one standing there takes a share of the pot you set. It keeps the people who busted early still playing, which is usually who stops paying attention first.

Can I use it as a fundraiser?

Yes. Charge an entry fee, set the cut your program keeps, and the rest becomes the pot. Supporters pay you directly — ChooseASquare never holds the money and never takes a percentage, so the whole cut is yours.

Do players pay a platform fee?

Never. Players pay only the entry fee you set, straight to you. The organizer pays for the software, not the players.

Running more than one pool?

A loser pool pairs naturally with the formats your players already know — see the NFL survivor pool guide, NFL Pick’Em and NFL Confidence pool, or compare us with OfficeFootballPool.

Start your loser pool free

Set the rules, share one link, and let it score itself every week from live results.

Start free →