Survivor
Survivor, eliminator or suicide pool in the United States, last man standing in Britain. Same format, several names. It is the cheapest pool in sports to explain and the one most likely to end in an argument, because almost all of it is edge cases.
Every entry names a single team to win, before the first game of the week locks. There is nothing else to submit. That is why survivor pulls in people who will not fill out a full week of picks and will not look at the standings.
There is no partial credit. Your team wins or your entry is finished, which gives one ordinary game in an ordinary week an amount of tension the result does not deserve.
The reuse rule forces a decision every single week: burn a strong team on a game you would probably win anyway, or save it for the stretch where you will have nothing good left. Everyone works this out after they have already spent the best three teams in the league.
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 sport and by crowd, and each one changes how long your pool lasts.
This is the decision that does not travel between sports. In the NFL, ties are so rare you can write the rule and forget it. In soccer, draws are routine, so eliminating on a draw roughly doubles the attrition rate and finishes your pool far sooner. Set it by sport, not by copying the NFL rule set into a soccer pool.
Pure survivor eliminates on the first loss. A two-strike pool lets an entry survive one wrong pick, which keeps far more of your players involved into the back half of the season at the cost of a slower finish. 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 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 pool finished at exhaustion and split it between the survivors. The reset is more fun. The finish is cleaner.
Every remaining entry picks the same hot team, that team loses, and your pool is empty. The three workable answers are to void the week and replay it, to declare everyone who was still standing a joint winner, or to run one rebuy week. All three are defensible. Deciding after the final whistle never looks fair, however fair you are being.
Someone forgets, every week. Either eliminate them or auto-assign a default, usually the highest-ranked 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 midpoint, 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 Sunday 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 pool 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 favorite most weeks, ties effectively nonexistent and 32 teams to draw from. Everything the format needs.
Known as last man standing in Britain, and structurally harsher than the American version because draws eliminate and 20 clubs have to cover 38 matchweeks.
Leagues with multiple games per team per week, or no clear favorites, or fields too small to sustain a reuse rule. Survivor needs one game per team per week 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 pool type you switch on yourself. If that is the pool you need, talk to our team and tell us the rule set, including the tie rule and the strike count, because we are building against real commissioners.
Branded hubs on your logo, your colors and your domain. Automatic schedules and automatic scoring from the live feed. Live leaderboards, groups, confidence points, knockout brackets, season-long pick'em and the Banter Board. That is the engine a survivor pool would sit on.
Survivor's weakness is that it removes most of your players early, by design. The commissioners who get the most out of it run a season-long pick'em pool in parallel, so the person knocked out in Week 3 still has a reason to open the email in Week 14.
One pick per person is easy. Checking every surviving entry against every result, every week, tracking which teams each person has already spent, and doing it before anyone complains is not. Automatic schedules and results are the difference between a pool that finishes and one that quietly stops.