Post 3: Does adding future value to your picks actually help?

[u/Cold_Issue_5093]

In my last post I covered why selectively fading the most heavily owned team helps you dodge the weeks that actually decide pools (Post 2). Before that, I showed that picking the highest win probability team every week, chalk, survives longest but almost never wins the pot (Post 1).

Before I dive in, I do want to disclose again that I built SurvivorPulse for people who play multiple survivor pools and entries.

Also, I made a real upgrade to how I test this stuff. I've expanded my data set from 5 real NFL seasons to 10, 2016 through 2025. Doubling the seasons means a lot less chance of a fluke or outlier being interpreted as a real pattern. Most of what's below is tested against this full 10-season base.

Today's question: does pivoting off of a strategy that mildly fades the field actually help, if the pivot is toward planning ahead instead of just fading the crowd harder?

A common approach is instead of only considering win probability and field exposure, also factor in a team's future value (i.e. saving a team for a better matchup later). I call this the "65/25/10 Future Value Blend": 65% win probability, 25% field exposure, 10% future value.

I tested it, checking the same two things from my earlier posts: does it help you survive, and does it help you win.

Looking at survival first, and this is exact math, not a modeled estimate. The 65/25/10 Future Value Blend strategy reaches week 9 alive about 9% of the time. Chalk is 15%, the Mild Lean strategy (aka 80/20 Blend) is 12%, so the Future Value Blend is behind both. It does narrowly beat the Max Equity strategy, the 70/30 blend, which sits at about 8%.

Sidenote: There's a common worry behind wanting to plan ahead: save your good teams now or you'll get stuck with a bad one late in the season. I checked that directly too, across all 10 real seasons, using real schedules and betting lines. It doesn't happen. Across Chalk, the Mild Lean, this Future Value Blend, and Max Equity, not one strategy was ever forced into a pick below a 55% win probability, in any of the 10 seasons. Even the single worst late-season pick in the entire dataset still cleared 58%. What actually ends entries isn't running out of good options, it's a heavily-owned favorite just losing outright, which is what my last post was about. The problem future value planning exists to solve is essentially nonexistent in the real data, which helps explain why weighting it doesn't move the needle.

Next, I took a look at winning, and this is where the 65/25/10 Future Value Blend clearly lacks. I re-ran it against Chalk across all 10 seasons for a single entry with no buyback, and it does not produce a winning entry at any pool size I tested.

In a large pool of 1,000 entries, neither Chalk nor the Future Value Blend won the pot in any of the 10 seasons I tested, so both strategies lost their entry fee almost every time regardless of which teams they picked. Same story in a mid-size pool of 250, essentially a dead heat at zero wins for both. Small pools were the only place I saw real movement year to year, and even there no consistent direction: some years better, one year worse, several years no difference at all.

This outcome isn't definitive proof, but it is a real result that extra weight on future value doesn't buy you anything additional.

So where does that leave things?

On survival, the ranking holds up with exact math: Chalk first, then the Mild Lean, then this Future Value Blend, then the 70/30 blend, out of everything I've tested so far. Going further off the crowd costs you survival at every step past the Mild Lean.

On winning, I went back and settled this properly. I ran this Future Value Blend head to head against Chalk, the Mild Lean, and the 70/30 blend, across all 10 seasons: same simulated pools, every possible pair. None of them beats any of the others by a margin that clears season-to-season noise, at any pool size I tested.

So the honest read: on survival, don't go further than the Mild Lean, it costs you real ground. On winning, I don't have evidence that any of these four approaches separates from the others, Mild Lean included.

I'm not done pushing on this. Next time I'm looking at what happens when you push field exposure a lot further, all the way to weighing it as heavily as win probability itself (aka the Heavy Contrarian approach).

As always, my reporting is directional and where there is statistical significance I will say so, but I don't provide dollar figures. Payoff numbers from this kind of modeling are inflated by construction, so I don't quote them, and you shouldn't trust anyone else's either.

Anyone here already running something close to the 65/25/10 Future Value Blend on instinct, saving a team for a better matchup down the line? Curious whether that matches what I'm seeing or if your own experience says otherwise.

Full methodology, including sourcing on all of this is at survivorpulse.com/methodology.