Survivor
Survivor in Australia and the United States, last man standing in Britain, eliminator or suicide pool depending on who is talking. Same format, four names. It is the cheapest competition in sport to explain and the one most likely to end in an argument, because almost all of it is edge cases.
Every entry nominates a single team to win, before the first match of the round locks. There is nothing else to submit. That is why survivor pulls in people who will not fill out a full round of tips and will not look at a ladder.
There is no partial credit. Your team wins or your entry is finished, which gives one ordinary fixture in an ordinary round an amount of tension the result does not deserve.
The reuse rule forces a decision every single round: burn a strong team on a match you would probably win anyway, or save it for the run of fixtures where you will have nothing good left. Everyone works this out after they have already spent the best three teams in the competition.
It ends when a single entry is left standing, when the pick list is exhausted, or when everybody goes out at once. Two of those three outcomes need a rule written in advance.
Survivor is almost entirely rules and almost not at all scoring. What follows is the set of decisions that differ by code and by audience, and each one changes how long your competition lasts.
This is the decision that does not travel between codes. In gridiron, ties are so rare you can write the rule and forget it. In football, draws are routine, so eliminating on a draw roughly doubles the attrition rate and finishes your competition far sooner. In Australian rules and rugby league, draws sit somewhere in between: rare enough to feel unfair, common enough to happen. Set it by code, not by copying the American rule set.
Pure survivor eliminates on the first loss. A two-strike competition lets an entry survive one wrong pick, which keeps far more of your audience involved into the back half of the season at the cost of a slower resolution. If your goal is engagement rather than a fast winner, strikes are the highest-impact rule you can change.
A format constraint people rarely plan for. With 18 or 20 clubs and a season considerably longer than that, a surviving entry eventually has nobody left to pick. Either reset the list and let everyone start again from the full field, or declare the competition finished at exhaustion and split it between the survivors. The reset is more fun. The finish is cleaner.
Every remaining entry picks the same in-form side, that side loses, and your competition is empty. The three workable answers are to void the round and replay it, to declare everyone who was still standing a joint winner, or to run one rebuy round. All three are defensible. Deciding after full time never looks fair, however fair you are being.
Someone forgets, every round. Either eliminate them or auto-assign a default, usually the highest-placed available team the entry has not used. Defaulting keeps people in and keeps it sociable. Separately, a single rebuy at a fixed point, the new year or the halfway mark, is the most effective thing you can do for participation after the early casualties pile up.
Hide picks until lock and nobody copies the survivors. Reveal them after lock and the afternoon gets significantly more interesting, because watching most of the field ride on one result is the best thing this format produces. Multiple entries per person make a competition last longer and give people a reason to stay involved after their first entry dies, but the eventual winner may simply be whoever took the most chances.
The natural home. One game per team per week, a clear favourite most weeks, ties effectively nonexistent and 32 teams to draw from. Everything the format needs.
Known as last man standing, and structurally harsher than the American version because draws eliminate and 20 clubs have to cover 38 gameweeks.
Works well, with a twist: bye rounds remove some of your best options in the exact weeks the field is thinnest, and 18 or 17 clubs is a short pick list against a 24 or 27 round season.
Competitions with multiple fixtures per team per round, or no clear favourites, or fields too small to sustain a reuse rule. Survivor needs one match per team per round and a pick list long enough to create a real decision.
We would rather say so than write a page that implies otherwise. Fanzava does not currently ship survivor or eliminator as a ready-made competition type you switch on yourself. If that is the competition you need, talk to our team and tell us the rule set, including the draw rule and the strike count, because we are building against real organisers.
Branded hubs on your logo, your colours and your domain. Automatic fixtures and automatic scoring from the live feed. Live leaderboards, groups, confidence weighting, knockout brackets, season-long tipping and the Banter Board. That is the engine a survivor competition would sit on.
Survivor's weakness is that it removes most of your audience early, by design. The organisers who get the most out of it run a season-long tipping competition in parallel, so the person knocked out in round three still has a reason to open the email in round 14.
One pick per person is easy. Checking every surviving entry against every result, every round, tracking which teams each person has already spent, and doing it before anyone complains is not. Automatic fixtures and results is the difference between a competition that finishes and one that quietly stops.
Want something you can start today? See season-long tipping →