Survivor Odds To Win
“I picked Ethan to win, so what do I know?” Rob Cesternino asked when The A.V. Club got him on the phone to share his thoughts on who will win Survivor: Winners At War.And it’s true: He did pick Ethan Zohn as the odds-on favorite to win season 40 when we asked for his thoughts ahead of the all-winners season premiere in February.But Cesternino—who made it to the final three on 2003’s. Another popular survivor myth is that you should avoid picking teams playing on the road. But the betting market info accounts for home field advantage, and this one does not hold up if you go by win odds. Survivor Pool Myth #3: Just Survive The Early Season, Then Figure It Out.
You just need them to win, and you don't care how they do it or by what margin. The other compelling aspect of survivor is that, depending on the size of the pool, you can win quite a bit of money. In a $50 buy-in pool with 1,000 people, you're talking about $50,000 to the winner. Even in a modest $20 buy-in with 100 people, there's a $2,000 pot.
This article is part of our fantasy football advice & strategy series.
Pick one team to win outright each week. If you are correct, you move on to the next week. If you're wrong – and the team loses – you're out. The last man standing is the winner. But there's one catch: You can't use the same team twice.
The beauty of survivor is that unlike with handicapping games against the spread or playing fantasy football, your interests are 100 percent aligned with the teams' (except maybe in Week 17, but that's a problem you hope to have because it means you made it that far.) There's no getting screwed when the backup running back scores the touchdown, or when the team with the big lead takes its foot off the gas in the second half and allows a backdoor cover. You just need them to win, and you don't care how they do it or by what margin.
The other compelling aspect of survivor is that, depending on the size of the pool, you can win quite a bit of money. In a $50 buy-in pool with 1,000 people, you're talking about $50,000 to the winner. Even in a modest $20 buy-in with 100 people, there's a $2,000 pot. And it requires little work – just clicking on one team each week.
But the ultra-simple setup belies a surprising strategic complexity. At first, it seems the best way to win is simply picking the biggest favorite each week. For Week 1, that would be the Seahawks at home against the Dolphins. It's actually not a bad strategy, but by doing that you will use up the league's elite teams (usually the biggest favorites) quickly.
Realizing this, some will try to preserve the best teams by looking at the NFL schedule and working backward from Week 17. The idea is to find reasonably big favorites each week and plan it out ahead of time. If the only good game on paper in Week 11 is the Seahawks over the Eagles, then you wouldn't use the Seahawks in Week 1 because you'd want to save them for that difficult week.
This is a terrible strategy.
We don't know how the NFL landscape will look 10 weeks hence. Often, a team picked to finish last will contend for a division title, and a team picked by many to win will be a doormat. What if Russell Wilson gets hurt? What if the Eagles are much better than we think? Moreover, even if Wilson is fine, and the Seahawks are 87/13 favorites over the Eagles, maybe there will be another lopsided matchup due to injuries or a team emergence about which we have no idea. There's so much uncertainty even for the coming week in the NFL that looking multiple weeks ahead is a mistake.
So, picking the biggest favorite each week is the foundation of sound survivor strategy, but it's incomplete. That's because it leaves out a key variable: ownership percentage.
Ownership Percentage is Key
While the short-term goal in survivor is to survive, the only way to actually win is by surviving while everyone else perishes. It is not enough to make it through Week 12 if 80 percent of your pool is standing right there with you. Your $10 entry in a 100-person pool will have an 'equity value' of only $12.50 ($1,000/80) if 79 others are still alive, too.
So, while the Vegas odds can tell you how likely it is the team you're considering will win (the Seahawks are roughly 78.5 percent favorites), they cannot tell you how much that win is worth to you.
Wait, aren't all wins worth the same because they mean you survived to the subsequent week? No, they're not, because making it to Week 2 with 50 people left is worth a lot more than making it to Week 2 with 80 people left.
Taking the $10 buy-in, 100-person pool as our example (entry fees and number of entrants vary widely), if half were to lose in Week 1, then your surviving entry would be worth $20 in Week 2, i.e., you'd be one of 50 people still vying for the $1,000 prize, and $1,000/50 = $20. That's much better than the 80-person scenario worth only $12.50. Now, you don't get to cash out with 50 people left (unless you all agreed to it, which would never happen), so that $20 is not liquid, but it is the amount of equity you have in the pool.
If the Vegas odds determine the likelihood of winning, the ownership percentages determine what our payout is. For example, if you knew 50 percent of people would be on the Seahawks to beat the Dolphins, but only 20 percent on the Chiefs (77.8 percent likely to win vs. the Chargers, let's say), you also know that by taking the Chiefs, you'd be in a position to survive with only 50 people left should the Seahawks lose**. By taking the Seahawks, your upside would be surviving with 79 other people if the Chiefs lost**.
But how could you know in advance half the people in your pool would take the Seahawks? What if you guess wrong, take the Chiefs, and actually more people are foolishly saving the Seahawks for Week 11, and in fact 50 percent are on the Chiefs? There is no way to know for sure, but we can get a pretty good idea using 'polling data.'
I use Officefootballpools.com (you could also get numbers from ESPN or Yahoo, but they have more free leagues, which provide noisy data) and look at ownership percentages across all its pools (it has tens or hundreds of thousands, so the sample is quite large). If I see the Seahawks are 49 percent used and the Chiefs 21 percent, I'll have a pretty good idea most people in my pool are leaning that way too. It's not perfect, but especially early in the year when everyone has all teams available, it's an excellent way to estimate ownership percentages.
Why Skeptics of Ownership Percentage are Wrong
Some are skeptical of this reasoning: 'You're really going to take worse Team X over better Team Y in the hopes of more equity the following week? No way. Name of the game is to survive, and I'm not taking that risk.'
The objection is absolutely correct if your goal were simply to survive as long as possible. But, as mentioned, surviving is not the way to win; you must survive while everyone else does not. And if my Seahawks/Chiefs example was unpersuasive, let me use a more extreme one that makes it obvious:
Let's assume in your 100-person pool, you knew 99 were taking the Seahawks. And let's (for the sake of the example) assume for whatever reason you only could take them or the biggest underdog on the board, the Dolphins, who play the Seahawks. (You would never actually do this, but it'll drive home the point.) If you take Seattle you have a 100 percent chance to make it to Week 2 (win or lose, everyone else is on them too). If you take Miami you have a 21.5 percent chance. Which would you take?
The answer should be obvious: the Dolphins, of course! Because with the Seahawks you're alive, but you still have the same amount of equity you started with, $10. But if the Dolphins win, you win the whole pool then and there, i.e., your equity is $1,000! By taking the Dolphins you have a 21.5 percent chance to win $1,000 and a 78.5 percent chance to lose $10. By taking the Seahawks you have a one percent chance to win $1,000 (you're still one of 100 people trying to get there) and a 99 percent chance to lose $10 eventually. The Dolphins – the biggest underdog on the board – are the better choice by a factor of 21.5! Even so, it remains the case that if your goal were merely surviving as long as possible (rather than winning the pool), the Seahawks give you a 100 percent chance to see Week 2, and the Dolphins merely 21.5. But you can see how worthless that is.
So the ownership percentage variable is a significant one, and it must be incorporated into our Survivor strategy.
Simple Math = Significant Advantage
The math involved in choosing between two teams with different ownership percentages and odds to win gets a little more complex when it's not a simple 99:1 scenario outlined above – but it's still not multivariable calculus. When comparing two teams, calculate the likelihood Team X wins while Team Y loses vs. Team Y wins/Team X loses. (If they both win or both lose, it doesn't matter which one you took.) Then compare the ratio of the likelihood of the former scenario to the latter. That's your 'risk ratio.'
Then you use ownership percentages to figure out how many people would remain in your pool in each scenario, and use that to calculate the prospective equity in each case and compare them to generate your 'reward ratio.'
Let's use the Seahawks and Chiefs as our example:
SEA Win % - 78.5
KC Win % - 77.8
SEA W & KC L % (.785 x .222) - 17.427
KC W & SEA L % (.778 x .215) - 16.727
Risk Ratio (17.427/16.727) - 1.04
SEA W & KC L is 4 percent more likely
SEA Own* % - 50
KC Own* % - 20
SEA W & KC L Equity** ($1,000/70) - $14.29
KC W & SEA L Equity** ($1,000/40) - $25
Reward Ratio (25/14.29) - 1.75
KC W & SEA L is a 75 percent better payout
* These are not real ownership numbers (not available). They are made up for the purposes of the example.
** The Equity in the event of a Seahawks win/Chiefs loss is calculated as follows: If 20 people are on the Chiefs, and they lose, that means 80 people will remain. But remember, if 50 are on the Seahawks and 20 on the Chiefs, that means there are 30 more people on other teams, some of which will also lose. (You can calculate this number more precisely when the polling data comes in, and you match the percentage owned for those other teams with their Vegas odds. For the sake of simplicity, I assumed 10 of those 30 will lose.) If we add 10 more losers on other teams, that means 70 remain. So in the Seahawks win/Chiefs lose scenario, those who took the Seahawks have $1,000 (total money in the pool) divided by 70, which equals $14.29. Doing the same thing for the Chiefs win/Seahawks lose scenario, there are 40 people left, and $1,000/40 equals $25.
As you can see from the chart, the Seahawks win/Chiefs lose scenario is 4 percent more likely to obtain than the reverse. But the payout is 75 percent better should Chiefs win/Seahawks lose scenario come to pass. Under this example, it's clear – assuming you agree with Vegas' assessments of the teams' chances – the Chiefs would be the better Survivor pick for Week 1. (Again, this is based on hypothetical ownership numbers and not intended as actual advice for this season.)
The Bottom Line
Survivor is a simple game that requires little maintenance, offers the possibility of a big payout and aligns players with the goals of the team for which they're rooting. And its deceptive strategic complexity allows those who grasp it to have a significant edge.
That said, I don't want to undersell its unique capacity to inflict misery – only a small number of people win every year (if the pool is large, the last few survivors often split the pot), NFL games are often decided on the most arbitrary plays (bad calls, fumbles, the indecipherable catch rule) and being forced to pick among bad choices, if you get far enough, can drive a person insane.
But there hasn't been a year since 1999 when I didn't have at least a few survivor entries.
Survivor season 40 is off and running, with episode seven ready to stick a knife in our back on March 25th. We shouldn’t want it any other way, either, as this conniving yet forever redeeming social strategy competition brings out the best (and worst) in all of us.
Season 40 left things on a pretty bitter (and impressively devious) note after episode six, but I won’t get into it to protect our readers from any Survivor spoilers.
Just be aware that once we dive into the latest Survivor 40 odds and predictions, I can’t make any promises.
Survivor Odds To Win Ghost Island
The point is this competition has been pretty fierce just six episodes in, and it’s only going to get crazier once the two tribes inevitably merge.
The return of the popular yet controversial Edge of Extinction also complicates matters, but anyone looking to wager on the series at sites where you can bet on Survivor will want to consider all the options.
Will someone come back out of the Edge of Extinction to get the improbable win? Or should you stick with the top contenders?
Let’s break each option down as we prepare for a new Survivor episode this week.
Vlachos makes sense as the favorite in terms of ability (he won season 28), while he’s without a doubt one of the loudest personalities in the game.
That latter attribute could easily get him eliminated at some point, though, and it’s relatively shocking it hasn’t already.
Vlachos is clever and gifted enough physically to survive on his own accord, but don’t be shocked if his overconfidence does him in before the season is up.
Kim Spradlin-Wolfe (+500)
Next up is a three-way tie to win season 40 of Survivor, and we can start with Kim Spradlin-Wolfe, who won in 2012.
Kim has rebounded nicely since originally struggling to latch on with the strategic networking of the show, and she’s now in discussions with Denise.
Is that good or bad after what transpired in episode six? More on that in a bit.
That could make her a very interesting pick, especially if she opts to flip at the right time and have Denise taste some of her own medicine. It’ll surely take a huge move like that to give Kim a shot, even with her odds looking great.
A recent Survivor winner, Michele is one of the few contestants who has been embedded in the modern game, as she won in 2016.
That gives her a bit of an edge (and probably explains her odds), but she hasn’t been a big player yet this season and also was a bit too transparent with ex-boyfriend Wendell Holland.
If the emotional restraint and strategy don’t improve, I don’t see much of a reason to roll the dice on Fitzgerald.
Natalie Anderson (+500)
Anderson has great odds but is among the worst bets to win Survivor 40 due to her current residence in the Edge of Extinction.
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She won during Survivor: San Juan del Sur (2014), but she also was the first contestant voted off the island this season. Like everyone else in the Edge of Extinction, she still has a shot, but her odds seem twisted here.
This could be where the odds get interesting, as Clarke is still in the game and has proven to be pretty crafty this year.
Clarke has worked with Sarah Lacina pretty closely, and the two combated some key veterans while playing a strong game. Lacine offers better odds, but so far, there’s nothing bad to be said about how Clarke has performed in season 40.
Yul Kwon (+800)
Kwon carries himself with such quiet confidence and an approachable personality that he was one of my favorite threats to win from the jump.
I was excited to see his palatable +800 odds, especially since he’s played a good game so far and is also flying somewhat under the radar.
Proving his worth as winner of Survivor: Cook Islands back in 2006, Yul doesn’t appear to have lost a step when it comes to the intricacies of this intense game.
Lacina is understandably one of the best Survivor season 40 sleepers, both in regards to odds and the fact that she’s been somewhat overlooked.
As noted, she’s worked well with Sophie Clarke and has proven herself in regards to social networking and crafty play.
A police officer, Lacina has the natural gift of interrogation (without it feeling like it), as well as collecting, digesting, and implementing information. So far, so good for the 2017 winner.
Nick Wilson (+1000)
The 29-year-old Wilson is a very recent winner, having taken home the top prize in season 37 in 2018.
That could be an obvious advantage, and so far, it’s arguable it’s helped him stay afloat in season 40’s competition. However, to this point, he hasn’t made a huge mark, so not much stands out for him beyond his attractive price tag at the best Survivor betting sites.
As noted, Holland could be in some trouble due to the bad blood between him and his ex, Michele. She played her cards with him, though, so it won’t be shocking to see him use that to his advantage.
There’s also the chance he turns that around the other way. Either way, Holland is a proven winner (season 36), and he has the demeanor and athleticism to carry himself pretty far.
Australian Survivor 2019 Odds To Win
Ben Driebergen (+2000)
The 37-year-old military veteran won on Survivor: Heroes vs. Healers, and this season, he returned in tip-top shape, ready to make it to the end again.
Things have gone well for him to this point, as he really hasn’t been the focus of any eliminations, and his charm could again get him pretty far.
Survivor Odds To Win
He wouldn’t be my first pick based solely on ability to stay alive via winning challenges, but he’s a fighter, and he can wiggle his way into new alliances. Oh, and the odds are nice.
The 41-year-old Collins is back for more after winning Survivor: Cambodia back in 2015. He’s another strong contestant that can physically get a lot of work done on his own and to this point has been overlooked.
His odds alone should have you take notice, but it’s worth wondering if he’s done enough from a strategic perspective through six episodes to set himself up for success.
Adam Klein (+2800)
The 28-year-old LA resident is hanging in there, but he obviously doesn’t have amazing odds to win Survivor season 40.
Klein has already won the game once, but it’s arguable he hasn’t done enough yet in this game to build a winning case even if he does make it to the final tribal council.
Pretty much anyone taking up residence at the Edge of Extinction is a pretty poor bet to win Survivor. Once the show decides to move the process along, it’s likely only one person will worm their way back into the competition.
That could be Parvati, but she has the odds stacked against her as the 7th person voted out. She’d have to win numerous challenges just to stay alive, assuming she even escapes the Edge of Extinction in the first place.
Denise Stapley (+5000)
Kudos to Denise for one of the most epic blindsides in Survivor history. Unfortunately, she no longer has an Immunity Idol, and everyone sees her as a major threat.
You could argue she has the strategy and ruthlessness to make it to the end, but that could be tough with everyone also seeing how deceptive she can be.
Sandra joined a long list of jettisoned Survivor alum, as she heads to the Edge of Extinction after being masterfully blindsided by Denise in the latest episode.
She’s a strong competitor and former two-time winner, so if she has a chance to make it out of Edge of Extinction, she could remain in this game. All things considered, these +10000 Survivor odds for such a great competitor are tough to ignore.
After all, Chris Underwood accomplished the impossible a couple of seasons ago, escaping the Edge of Extinction to win the whole show. If you think Sandra has a chance at doing that, this +10000 bet looks pretty appealing.
Summary
There is a lot of upside in taking a shot at someone stuck in the Edge of Extinction, but the main contenders to win Survivor 40 have also clearly shown themselves.
Whichever way you go, there is still room for profit. You just need to decide who to bet on at the top entertainment betting sites.
You can use this breakdown of the latest Survivor odds to help you figure out how to bet, but there is still a lot of time to gauge the right direction to go.
Survivor Season 40 Cast Odds To Win
For now, I’m not too keen on the main favorite, partially because he’s a bit obnoxious, and that could work against him. I also don’t love his price tag when you consider the risk, while a key strategy this year has been knocking out some of the older, more experienced players.
All things considered, I like Yul Kwan the best right now. He’s the total package in terms of strategy, athleticism, and networking. He has so far been pretty quiet, but I can see that changing in the near future.
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For constantly updated odds and contestant analysis for the remainder of season 40, be sure to bookmark our entertainment betting blog.