Midseason Performance Update: Football Pool Picks

Midseason Performance Update: Football Pool Picks

November 22, 2017 – by Tom Federico

We’ve been meaning to do a quick update on how our football office pool picks are doing this year, now that we’re into the second half of the NFL season and approaching the final stretch for season long pools.

Here’s some data on how things are going for our Football Pool Picks customers. Another post reviews how our NFL survivor pool picks are doing so far.

Football Pool Picks: Performance Update

Season Prize Pools

There’s still at least six weeks left in most season-long NFL or combination NFL + college football pick’em pools, so it’s premature to infer too much from where our customers currently stand in their pools.

But as a quick check-in, here’s what our customers in pools that only offer end-of-season prizes reported to us entering NFL Week 11:

25% of customers reported being in the top 5% of their pool standings39% of customers were in the top 10% of their pool standings57% of customers were in the top 20% of their pool standings

In other words, the percentage of our customers that are in the very top tier of their pool standings (top 5%) was about 5 times what you’d expect for an average competitor in the pool.

A slightly higher percentage of customers in point spread based pools were in the top 5-10% of their pool standings, compared to customers in game winner based pools. But it’s close.

A lot still can change between Week 11 and the end of the NFL season, especially since our recommended picks will start to get more aggressive in the final weeks of the season for people who are “out of the money” in their season prize pools. We’ll report the final numbers once we get them compiled after the Super Bowl.

Weekly Prize Pools

In the run-up to NFL Week 12, we just launched a new feature in our Football Pool Picks product that shows how often our customers report winning weekly prizes in their football pick’em pools.

(As context, the best strategy to win weekly prizes in football pick’em pools is typically much different than the best strategy to win an end-of-season prize. (Similar to daily fantasy football, the optimal “lineup” to win a one-week-only contest usually looks a lot different than the best strategy for drafting a team to win a season-long league.)

Weekly Prize Win Rates So Far

Here are some highlights from the data:

So far this season, our customers have reported winning a total of 1,994 weekly prizes in their pools.1,100 of those weekly prize wins have come in weeks when we specifically recommended using our picks designed to win weekly prizes.The other 894 came from customers in pools that offer both season and weekly prizes.Whenever we’ve recommended our picks designed to win weekly prizes in a specific week, our customers have actually won a weekly prize 11.3% of the time, compared to an expected weekly prize win rate of 6.4%.

Put another way, whenever we’ve recommended our weekly prize picks, so far this year our customers have won weekly prizes 80% more often than expected and have won at least one weekly prize in approximately 37% of the pools they’ve entered.

Customer Weekly Win Reports

Of course, there will always be some luck involved in whether our picks result in a weekly prize (or more than one weekly prize) for a specific customer during a specific season. But here are a few examples of the ROI some of our customers have already seen this season with our weekly prize pick recommendations, via email testimonials:

“I’m in a local bowling league they have a contest every week, just a $5 fee, I have won it 2 times this year for a total of $838! I’m using your site only. Also I’m in a much tougher one with 485 people using the points, I have won that 1 time for a $100 gift card. A big shout out to the best site out there.”

“I just purchased the NFL Football Pick ’em pool this past Sunday, Sept 10th. I took a chance and used TR picks for my 1st week picks. I placed 2nd in my pool of 17 players on Office Football Pools, winning $60, paying for Team Rankings subscription for the season…extremely cool.”

“Week 6 the site said I should use the Win the Week picks. Lo and behold, I did just that. Also, the 14 points on the Titans winning Monday night actually ended up catapulting me to the overall lead in the pool. I was wondering if buying this product would be worth it but thanks to your picks I have now won enough to pay for the products cost as well as my entry fee to the league with a little left over. I’m a believer.”

More Info…

If you’re curious, here’s more information on our Football Pool Picks product, as well as the midseason update on our NFL survivor pool picks.

If you’re interested in using our picks in a future pool of yours, next up in the seasonal rotation are College Bowl Pick’em Picks and NCAA Bracket Picks.

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