Suicide Pool: Rules and How It Works
The original name for football's most unforgiving game.
A suicide pool is the NFL contest your uncle has played since before the internet: pick one team to win each week, never pick the same team twice, and the first wrong pick ends your season. No spreads, no points, no second chances unless your pool hands out a mulligan.
If you have heard of a survivor pool, an eliminator pool, or last man standing, those are all this game under newer names. The rules never changed. Only the branding did.
Suicide pool rules
Pick one NFL team to win each week
No point spreads, no parlay math. Your team wins its game or your season ends.
Each team is one-time-use
Pick the Bills in Week 2 and they are gone from your board for the other seventeen weeks. The whole game lives in this rule.
One loss and you are out
That is where the grim name comes from. A tie counts as a loss in most modern pools, and so does forgetting to pick.
Last player alive wins
Pools bleed players every single week until one name is left standing, or the season ends with co-champions.
Ties, missed picks, mulligans, void weeks, and what happens when multiple players reach Week 18 are all covered in the complete rulebook. Every rule there applies to a suicide pool word for word.
Why is it called a suicide pool?
Because one bad Sunday is self-inflicted elimination. The name has softened over the decades, but the history explains why the same game answers to four names.
The office and bar era
Suicide pool is the name the game grew up with: photocopied grids, a commissioner collecting five dollar bills, picks scrawled before Sunday. If your dad played this game, this is what he called it.
The internet cleanup
As the game moved online, sites and leagues reached for friendlier names. Survivor pool flipped the framing to the winner, eliminator pool kept the menace but lost the darkness, and last man standing crossed over from British pubs.
Today
All four names describe the exact same rules. Long-running pools tend to keep whatever name they started with, which is why a thirty-year-old office pool says suicide pool while the group chat version says survivor.
Common suicide pool questions
What is a suicide pool?
A suicide pool is an NFL contest where every player picks one team to win each week, straight up. A loss knocks you out of the pool, you can never pick the same team twice in a season, and the last player standing wins. It is the original name for what most people now call a survivor pool.
Is a suicide pool the same as a survivor pool?
Yes, the rules are identical. Suicide pool is the older name, dating back decades in offices and bars. Survivor pool and eliminator pool became the common names as the game moved online, but plenty of long-running pools still go by the original.
What happens on a tie in a suicide pool?
In most pools, including Outpick, a tie counts as a loss because your team did not win. Some old-school pools treat a tie as a survive, so confirm the rule with your pool before the season starts.
How do I start a suicide pool with friends?
Decide the tie rule and whether players get a mulligan, then either set up a spreadsheet and collect picks manually every week, or use a survivor pool app that hides picks until kickoff, locks them automatically, and processes eliminations from live NFL results.
Run your suicide pool without the paperwork
Outpick keeps picks hidden until kickoff, locks them automatically, tracks every used team, and processes eliminations from live NFL results. Free to play, no money ever.
