SoSH Survivor Pool - Week 2 Discussion

edmunddantes

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Every pool today was a massacre with Bal, Mia, and NO all losing. 
 
Damn.
 
Barring the Joe Flacco underthrown DPI specials.
 

Future Sox Doc

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Current Week Team Count
 TeamCount
Saints3344
Dolphins1369
Ravens1361
Steelers716
Colts617
Rams471
Titans165
Eagles149
Panthers98
Bengals91
Cardinals83
Chiefs52
Giants39
Packers38
Patriots15
Browns11
Vikings7
Falcons6
Bills4
Lions4
Chargers3
Broncos3
49ers3
Seahawks3
Raiders3
Cowboys2
Texans2
Buccaneers1
Bears1
 
 
More than 1033 left. 
 

bostonbeerbelly

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None of us could have seen that coming, but I guess one of the things I didn't get was if we voted and had five teams with enough votes as of last night why that wasn't our selections. Why vote if it can be overturned by a few people in the early hours of the morning. Not saying I had any better picks than what we went with, but as a group we would have had 2 on PItt and 1 on Indy. Either way this sucks, was looking to a long run with this and never expected this to happen today.
 
bostonbeerbelly said:
None of us could have seen that coming, but I guess one of the things I didn't get was if we voted and had five teams with enough votes as of last night why that wasn't our selections. Why vote if it can be overturned by a few people in the early hours of the morning. Not saying I had any better picks than what we went with, but as a group we would have had 2 on PItt and 1 on Indy. Either way this sucks, was looking to a long run with this and never expected this to happen today.
 
Yeah, I think it's more a case that the groupthink approach wasn't executed well than that the groupthink approach is necessarily wrong in and of itself. There was a lot of analysis early in the week, and then the posts (and votes) dried up right around the time where the final discussions should have been heating up. On a board this large, I think you need to have hard and fast schedules and voting rules for this sort of thing to work.
 

Future Sox Doc

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I had 8 entries with a friend, only one left is the Colts. This was a massacre of epic proportions. 6 of the top 8 teams picked across the board lost (winner- Steelers, Colts yet to play). There is very little anything could have been done for anyone. What a day. Holy crap.  
 

Papelbon's Poutine

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Would it be am amiable to keep going - obviously here amongst those of that will be interested again next year - and toy with the different scenarios? Perhaps pretend we still have all 22 picks open and pick a few different strategies and track how it does?
 

Stitch01

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Well I don't feel as bad for going heavy NO in my own pools after that shit show. Maybe we could have had a couple left but we were basically destined to get slaughtered this week
 

Deathofthebambino

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One thing I noticed about the analysis in this thread, as an outside observer, was that it appeared people were afraid to go against teams that won in week one.  I think that's what led to you guys not picking Pitt or Indy on any tickets and instead going against Tampa, Jacksonville and Oakland.  I won't say more than that as I don't want to make things worse, but the NFL is fucking hard.  Really, really hard to predict. 
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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I dont. Give me 'Zona or give me death!
I have to say I find it remarkable the restraint you've shown here. Other people would have said "I told you so" in a much more direct manner.

Maybe we should just let you decide our entries next year?
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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wade boggs chicken dinner said:
I have to say I find it remarkable the restraint you've shown here. Other people would have said "I told you so" in a much more direct manner.

Maybe we should just let you decide our entries next year?
I was confident enough in Arizona that I won $400 on them today, so that helps.

Early season lines are wonky and there was no reason for Arizona to only be a 2 point favorite. That team was very good before Palmer got hurt last year, and while their D isn't as good this year, I figured they'd make a turnover prone QB like Cutler pay. The only thing going for the Bears over the last 5 years was that they could score points. No Marshall and a gimpy Jeffrey really limits that.

If people are just going to look at spreads, odds, and gambling experts, you may as well just not play. The only thing I'm frustrated about is that I didn't defend my Arizona pick more vigorously. When people didn't like it, I backed down and went with the crowd, divying up my picks between the 3 most popular picks here. I should have thrown all 21 picks on Zona like I did Miami last week. Maybe it would have sparked more discussion.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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If people are just going to look at spreads, odds, and gambling experts, you may as well just not play.
That's an interesting statement. If we're not going to look at spreads, odds, and gambling experts, how should we decide?

Not trying to be snarky but would be interested in your thoughts on how to do this.

For example, I will guess that a substantial majority of our group picked NO because they were 10 point favourites. If they weren't such a big favourite, I'm sure we would have skipped them.
 

tims4wins

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You can't separate the lines from opinions. It is blurry. We picked NO because they were at home against a 2-14 team from last year that got pummeled in week 1, not because the spread was 10. But the spread was big because of those factors. Hard to separate.

You are never as good as you look when you win big and never as bad as you look when you get blown out. I have been saying it all week that at least one big favorite and maybe multiple were going down this week.

Dare I say...go Jets
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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tims4wins said:
You can't separate the lines from opinions. It is blurry. We picked NO because they were at home against a 2-14 team from last year that got pummeled in week 1, not because the spread was 10. But the spread was big because of those factors. Hard to separate.

You are never as good as you look when you win big and never as bad as you look when you get blown out. I have been saying it all week that at least one big favorite and maybe multiple were going down this week.

Dare I say...go Jets
Of course you can separate line from opinion. I don't even look at the lines when making these picks.
 

tims4wins

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Kenny F said:
Of course you can separate line from opinion. I don't even look at the lines when making these picks.
Neither do I but my gut still told me NO was a fairly safe pick. The point I was trying to make is that it is hard to separate it - were they a popular pick because of a big spread or was the spread so big because they were a popular pick? Chicken and egg type deal
 

FL4WL3SS

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Kenny F'ing Powers said:
I was confident enough in Arizona that I won $400 on them today, so that helps.

Early season lines are wonky and there was no reason for Arizona to only be a 2 point favorite. That team was very good before Palmer got hurt last year, and while their D isn't as good this year, I figured they'd make a turnover prone QB like Cutler pay. The only thing going for the Bears over the last 5 years was that they could score points. No Marshall and a gimpy Jeffrey really limits that.

If people are just going to look at spreads, odds, and gambling experts, you may as well just not play. The only thing I'm frustrated about is that I didn't defend my Arizona pick more vigorously. When people didn't like it, I backed down and went with the crowd, divying up my picks between the 3 most popular picks here. I should have thrown all 21 picks on Zona like I did Miami last week. Maybe it would have sparked more discussion.
It all goes back to the fact that this week was very disorganized. If we're going to do this next year we need to decide on an approach and stick to it.

I would have thrown some votes on Carolina and Arizona. Also, no idea how we missed putting picks on Pittsburgh.

Oh well, it was fun for a week.
 

edmunddantes

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The only reason why I was down on NO was just a gut reaction to them killing me last year. So I was against overplaying them. Once we didn't over play them I was fine.

I went out in my other pool because of Miami even if we didn't play NO I wasn't that upset with us playing a lot on Bal or Miami so we still would have been pummeled. Unless we soread out to 4-5 teams which people seemed like they were against.

So not sure how we were going to avoid the bloodbath this week other than maybe saving 3-4 picks.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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It all goes back to the fact that this week was very disorganized. If we're going to do this next year we need to decide on an approach and stick to it.

I would have thrown some votes on Carolina and Arizona. Also, no idea how we missed putting picks on Pittsburgh.

Oh well, it was fun for a week.
We were saving PIT for future value.

I can identify a lot of our issues but I don't have any answers. Maybe we're overthinking - there is no ideal answer; it's mostly luck involved; and we'd probably do just as well if we just voted without any discussion.

Or maybe we need to split up our entries into two (or more) groups for each identified strategy. I mean the diversify crowd can have one part; the crowd that thinks it's better to use fewer teams can have another part. That way we won't be split down the middle and it's likely that one of the groups will do well in most outcomes.
 

glennhoffmania

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Despite the disorganization this week I think we still made the right picks. There's no point in spreading picks around just for the hell of it. We had three really solid options this week that took future value into account. In a pool with thousands of entries if you ignore future weeks you have no chance. The fact that Pit and AZ won doesn't mean they were necessarily better choices. We simply had everything possible go wrong today.
 

NortheasternPJ

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FL4WL3SS said:
It all goes back to the fact that this week was very disorganized. If we're going to do this next year we need to decide on an approach and stick to it.

I would have thrown some votes on Carolina and Arizona. Also, no idea how we missed putting picks on Pittsburgh.

Oh well, it was fun for a week.
It all goes back to this week was a bloodbath. Pats beat up Pitt. San Francisco killed Minnesota. Minnesota beat up Detroit this week. Pitt kills San Francisco.

Unless you're Going to spread out picks to 10 teams per week this can happen.

80% of my pool of 700 is gone after this week. 95% will be gone if Indy loses

It's just one of those weeks.
 

FL4WL3SS

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NortheasternPJ said:
It all goes back to this week was a bloodbath. Pats beat up Pitt. San Francisco killed Minnesota. Minnesota beat up Detroit this week. Pitt kills San Francisco.

Unless you're Going to spread out picks to 10 teams per week this can happen.

80% of my pool of 700 is gone after this week. 95% will be gone if Indy loses

It's just one of those weeks.
My point was that I think some other teams would have gotten consideration. We wouldn't have avoided losing a ton of picks, but maybe we'd have some left. Then again maybe not.
 

Reverend

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ConigliarosPotential said:
Long-time listener, first-time caller, etc... (I also have no stake in the pool.)
 
This discussion is fascinating, but I have noticed some recency bias in the analysis. Not to pick on DOTB specifically, but this is a great example of what I mean:
 
Whoops.
 

tonyandpals

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People gotta vote for the votes to be counted. Only 6 teams got a whiff and most of the individual scenarios discussed during the week mostly called for 3-4 or 4 teams. I agree, there needs to be a tighter format and I was AWOL for a day when I could have put %s up sooner. If we stuck to the vote it would have been come out of it with 2 picks on PIT and one on IND. Scenario 5b(6) gave people a shot at something similar with a little more spread.  In the end, that vote needs to happen Saturday night to give a chance for input. Even though on Saturday I said it would be coming in the AM, we still had 9 votes out of the 15 or so active people for the week.
What a difference a week makes.
 

PaulinMyrBch

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FL4WL3SS said:
It all goes back to the fact that this week was very disorganized. If we're going to do this next year we need to decide on an approach and stick to it.

I would have thrown some votes on Carolina and Arizona. Also, no idea how we missed putting picks on Pittsburgh.

Oh well, it was fun for a week.
FWIW, I'm in a private league with friends. 25 entries. 19 left coming into today. 2 through, with a third possible with Indy tomorrow. I was the only one who picked Pittsburgh. 10/19 were on New Orleans. Bloody Sunday. I had two entries, went New Orleans and Pittsburgh. I was shocked when the picks opened and I was the lone guy on that game. Nuts. 
 

mauidano

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tonyandpals said:
People gotta vote for the votes to be counted. Only 6 teams got a whiff and most of the individual scenarios discussed during the week mostly called for 3-4 or 4 teams. I agree, there needs to be a tighter format and I was AWOL for a day when I could have put %s up sooner. If we stuck to the vote it would have been come out of it with 2 picks on PIT and one on IND. Scenario 5b(6) gave people a shot at something similar with a little more spread.  In the end, that vote needs to happen Saturday night to give a chance for input. Even though on Saturday I said it would be coming in the AM, we still had 9 votes out of the 15 or so active people for the week.
What a difference a week makes.
 
A HUGE thanks to you for standing behind and organizing this for the rest of us.  We did the best we could and ran into a buzzsaw of a Sunday. Wow.  We are hardly the only ones as mentioned above. Sucks being out early, we'll get 'em next year.
 

crystalline

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Thanks for running this. Get em next year and I'll get it together in time to buy shares. If anyone gets bored in the off season and wants to run some simulations of prior seasons to test strategies let me know and I will help out (set up around some kind of public python/Julia/R notebook).

PaulinMyrBch said:
FWIW, I'm in a private league with friends. 25 entries. 19 left coming into today. 2 through, with a third possible with Indy tomorrow. I was the only one who picked Pittsburgh. 10/19 were on New Orleans. Bloody Sunday. I had two entries, went New Orleans and Pittsburgh. I was shocked when the picks opened and I was the lone guy on that game. Nuts. 
Yeah and I think strategy is different in a league with 19 entries left than one with 2500 left. In the former you want to pick against the grain more as its likely to end in the next few weeks. In the latter there's a case to follow the crowd more and try to survive till week 12 or so when you then start to get risky. Or maybe my sense is wrong and in both cases you should diversify widely- but I suspect that's only true when you have a rare week 2 where all the favorites lose.

While I still lean towards maufman that we likely don't have an advantage picking winners, I have to give KFP credit. Guy was right about picks. And he said to watch a lot of football in the early weeks to guide your picks.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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crystalline said:
Thanks for running this. Get em next year and I'll get it together in time to buy shares. If anyone gets bored in the off season and wants to run some simulations of prior seasons to test strategies let me know and I will help out (set up around some kind of public python/Julia/R notebook).
Echo the thanks Tony.

And as for looking at past seasons, I'm happy to participate. I'd be very interested in knowing if there is any way to figure this out. If you have any thoughts on how to set it up, I'm all ears.

 
crystalline said:
Yeah and I think strategy is different in a league with 19 entries left than one with 2500 left. In the former you want to pick against the grain more as its likely to end in the next few weeks. In the latter there's a case to follow the crowd more and try to survive till week 12 or so when you then start to get risky. Or maybe my sense is wrong and in both cases you should diversify widely- but I suspect that's only true when you have a rare week 2 where all the favorites lose.

While I still lean towards maufman that we likely don't have an advantage picking winners, I have to give KFP credit. Guy was right about picks. And he said to watch a lot of football in the early weeks to guide your picks.
In thinking about this more, my gut feeling is that there are some seasons that it pays to stay close to the overall betting proportion just to make sure we get enough entries through.  However, other seasons (like this one), it pays to diversify as people don't really have a feel for who the good teams are and who the bad teams are. 
 
So perhaps - because it's almost impossible to figure out which to use season to season - the trick is to do both - i.e., instead of looking at our entries as one pool of 20-ish entries, we have two pools of 10-ish entries with the diversify crowd running one set of entries and the other crowd running the other set. 
 
I mention this because it seems to me that one of the sources of confusion was that we generally had two groups of voters (e.g., the last vote between Scenario 4 and Scenario 6) and the votes were reasonably close.  Instead of trying to choose between the two groups, this way we can use both.
 

tonyandpals

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wade boggs chicken dinner said:
 
In thinking about this more, my gut feeling is that there are some seasons that it pays to stay close to the overall betting proportion just to make sure we get enough entries through.  However, other seasons (like this one), it pays to diversify as people don't really have a feel for who the good teams are and who the bad teams are. 
 
So perhaps - because it's almost impossible to figure out which to use season to season - the trick is to do both - i.e., instead of looking at our entries as one pool of 20-ish entries, we have two pools of 10-ish entries with the diversify crowd running one set of entries and the other crowd running the other set. 
 
 
I like this thinking.
 
Anyone interested if they offer a 2nd chance pool, which they likely will with so many out.
 

glennhoffmania

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I'd definitely be up for it.  Yesterday was probably my worst football day ever in terms of my favorite team's performance, betting, fantasy and survivor.  And the part that bummed me out the most was getting knocked out of this pool.  Thanks for organizing, Tony, and hopefully we can continue with a 2nd chance pool.
 

weeba

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I may be interested.
 
In the first pool, it is what it is.  We went heavy on the games that seemed to be locks. There isn't any shame in going out that way. It's a buzzsaw weekend with the top picks all losing, sometimes that happens week 2, sometimes that happens week 10.  I prefer playing it save weeks 1-4 or so, and then going from there.
 
I'm in 2 other pools (3 picks each) and we're down to tonight's game as the only pick left.  We went 0-4 yesterday, on 4 different teams.
 

Cumberland Blues

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I'd play i fthey offer a second chance pool...despite the craptastic outcome - this has been fun for me.  I've not followed the NFL very closely for years - this has given me reason to get back into it a bit and I've enjoyed it.
 
In terms of methods of trying to break up the groupthink a bit...splitting into smaller substets with different folks involved in each group is one way...or - this may be too much for Tony to manage, I dunno - but maybe have small teams for each ticket.  If you buy a whole $75 share you get to run a ticket by yourself, with groups of 2 or 3 running tickets if they bought $25 or $50 worth.  As tickets get knocked out - those folks can still opine on other tickets....then we don't get into the larger groupthink mode until later in the process when only a few tickets are left.
 

FL4WL3SS

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The more I think about it, the more I think the strategy, at least early on, is to go heavy on a few teams and then spread single picks out to random games. If we had, say, 5 picks on NO, 5 picks on MIA and 3 picks on BAL, we could have spread the other 8 picks on 4-8 other teams. That way you're likely to get some picks through in case a situation like this occurs.
 
The goal is to have the last pick standing and I think our mindset is to get the most picks through each week. We should be willing to sacrifice some picks here and there to ensure that we get at least SOME picks through.