Elimination pool

What an elimination pool is

An elimination pool is the family name for any contest built on removal. Every entrant starts alive, a wrong pick takes you out, and the field keeps shrinking until one entrant is left or the contest ends and the survivors share the prize. The NFL survivor pool is the best-known member of the family, but the same shape shows up in college football pools, golf pools where you pick one player per tournament, and bracket-style contests where a single miss ends your run.

What makes a contest an elimination pool is not the sport or the pick. It is the rule that a mistake costs you your place rather than a few points. That rule is what gives these pools their tension: every pick is sudden death, and the question each round is less about who will win than about who you can afford to be wrong about.

An example

In a hypothetical knockout pool for a golf season, 40 friends each pick one golfer per tournament, and any golfer who misses the cut eliminates the person who picked him. After the first month, 22 are left. By midsummer it is down to four, and the pool ends when the last of them picks a golfer who fails to make the weekend.

How Speed Survivor is different

Speed Survivor is an elimination pool compressed into one NFL game. Removal happens in two ways. In a single-life contest one wrong answer ends your run, and in every contest cuts remove the bottom of the field at set points. Points still matter along the way: a correct answer earns base points plus a speed bonus, so the survivors are ranked, and the pool is paid down published tiers rather than winner take all. See elimination for the ways a run ends and how it works for a full game.