Every Survivor-specific setting explained — what it does and how to think about choosing it. Find these settings in the Setup Wizard (Step 2) when creating a pool, or under Pool Settings any time after.
Each week, every player picks one NFL team they think will win. If their team wins, they survive to the next week. If their team loses, they're eliminated. You can't pick the same team twice in a season — once you've used a team, it's gone for the rest of the year. Last player (or players) standing wins.
Everything below controls the edge cases: what happens when someone forgets to pick, what happens on a bye week, and so on.
This is the most important setting in your pool. Every week, some players will forget to submit a pick before games start. You decide what happens to them.
You can choose one rule, or a chain of rules tried in order until one succeeds:
The simplest option. Anyone without a pick when the week locks is eliminated immediately. No exceptions.
The player is automatically assigned whichever team the most other players in your pool picked that week — as long as it's a team they haven't used yet, and the game hasn't started. If no valid team is left, they're eliminated.
Good for: pools where you want to give players a forgiving default, based on what the group as a whole is doing.
The player is automatically assigned the away team in that week's Monday Night Football game — as long as they haven't used that team yet. If they have, they're eliminated.
Good for: a simple, predictable fallback that doesn't depend on what anyone else picked.
If you have bye weeks enabled (see below) and the player hasn't used up their byes, they're automatically given a bye for the week instead of being eliminated. If byes aren't available or already used up, they're eliminated.
You can combine these — for example, "try Monday Night Visitor first, and if that's not possible, fall back to Most Popular Pick." The system tries each rule in the order you set, and only eliminates the player if every rule in the chain fails. Elimination is always the final fallback — you don't need to add it to the list.
If enabled, each player gets a limited number of "free passes" per season — weeks where they can sit out without picking a team and without being eliminated.
Byes are typically used in two ways: a player manually chooses to take a bye in a given week, or — if you've set Auto-Bye as part of your no-pick chain above — a forgotten pick automatically becomes a bye instead of an elimination.
Some commissioners like to raise the stakes later in the season by requiring two picks per week instead of one, starting at a week you choose. This isn't a single special week — once it starts, every surviving player must submit two picks (both must win to survive) every week from that point forward, continuing until the pool has a winner.
This is for creating a brand-new pool that begins at a later week instead of Week 1 — not for letting new players join an already-running pool partway through. Everyone in a mid-season pool starts together at the week you choose, with its own entries, fees, and prizes, completely separate from any other pool you're running.
This is popular for commissioners who want to offer a second pool to players who got eliminated early from their main pool and still want to play, or for groups that didn't get organized until a few weeks into the season.
Controls how many separate entries (essentially, separate "lives") a single player can have in your pool.
This is useful for office pools where some people want to buy in multiple times to improve their odds.
Controls exactly when a pick becomes locked in and can no longer be changed.
Players can always change their pick for a game that hasn't started yet. Once a specific game kicks off, that pick is locked — even if other games that week haven't started. Your week-lock setting determines the outer boundary for when picking closes entirely for the week.
You can update most of these settings any time from your pool's Settings page — not just during initial setup. Changes apply going forward; they don't retroactively change picks or results that have already been processed.
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