NFL Survivor Pool

Well, 2009 is in the books.  The final tally is 13 winners, with a payout of $403 and change each.

This will be the last blog post of 2009. Look for an email announcement for 2010 to be sent out sometime in late July  or early August. The email annoucement will go out via the announce_zebrapool distribution list, so make sure you’re on it to receive the announcement.

If you want to be added to the distribution list, you can subscribe by visiting: http://zebrapool.com/mailman/listinfo/announce_zebrapool.com

There’s been a lot of talk over the course of this season about altering some aspects of the game to avoid too many multiple winners next year. Thanks for all of the suggestions, but I think these are the changes that I’m going to implement next year:

1. Eliminating all buybacks. It is a survivor pool, after all. The only reason buybacks were in place was to extend the game in the early years of this pool. Everytime I took a look at the payout this season, eliminating buybacks would have decreased the $$ in the pool, but there would also be far fewer players remaining who made it through without needing any buyback advantage. 2009’s payout would have been more than $200 more per player if we didn’t have buybacks.
2. Doubling up on picks in specific weeks (to be determined prior to next season). So in certain weeks each player will be required to make two picks instead of just one. Both picks will need to win to move on. There will probably only be two or three weeks where this will happen.
3. Changing auto-picks to no longer pick a favored team. Auto-picks will choose an underdog instead. I haven’t decided if this should assign the biggest underdog or not.

Things I don’t think I’ll change:

1. Maximum number of picks will remain 5 per person. If you try to skirt this rule by signing up under a different name or there is any suspicious or shady behavior, you’ll get kicked out.
2. Entry fee will remain $10 per player. One of the reasons that this pool was started was due a major increase in the entry fee of the previous pool I and some friends participated in.

Add your thoughts below… They aren’t final yet so you might still be able to change my mind.

Happy new year, see ya next fall!

16 comments »

Well, now it’s reallllly interesting.

With one game to go, it’s either going to be 13 players left ($403 per) or 10 players left ($524) depending on what the Jets do tonight.

And just for the record, if we hadn’t had buybacks this year, it’d already be settled and it’d be $603 per player.

7 comments »

This is it! Here we go!

Can you believe that someone actually forgot to send in their pick this week?

I think it turned out to be a harder week to pick than normal, from all of the suspensions, injuries, teams resting their starters, etc. Should be interesting.

Go Iggles!

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Well, we’re down to our final week!

We have 24 players remaining and we are looking at a payout of $218 per player. (Would have been 15 players with $241 each  if we didn’t have buybacks.)

I will contact each player that makes it through week seventeen to arrange the payout. Please wait until I contact you. Obviously, Paypal is the easiest option for me. I can just send it right back to you. If you need a check instead, it’ll take a few extra days to move the money around and cut a check to you. (Tips are greatly appreciated!)

Only Sunday games this final week, so we should know by Sunday night what the final tally is. All picks due by 10am ET on Sunday.

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Penultimate week of the season is here!

All received picks have been posted. Can’t believe it, but one player didn’t submit a pick this week. If you made it through fifteen weeks, don’t you think you’d make sure you submitted a pick? linesmaker appears to be back up and running.

Eight different teams were picked by our 26 remaining players. Should be an interesting week.

Open thread below.

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