How Grading Works
Outcome | What Happens |
Correct Pick | Entry advances to the next week. (Pick Winners: team wins / covers. Pick Losers: team loses / fails to cover.) |
Incorrect Pick | Entry loses 1 life. At 0 lives, the entry is eliminated. |
Tie Game | Graded per the commissioner's Tie Game Outcome setting — Loss by default; can be set to Win. |
Multi-Pick Weeks | All picks that week must be correct to advance; losing any pick costs 1 life total for the week. |
Cancelled / Postponed / Suspended Game | All treated as "cancelled." Before kickoff: the pick stays editable until the deadline, so the member can just switch teams. After kickoff (or if never switched): the pick grades as a loss. |
Summary: Grading is simple at its core — right pick, survive; wrong pick, lose a life — but multi-pick weeks and cancelled games are two spots where the details matter, since a single bad pick in a multi-pick week costs only one life total, while a cancelled game not switched in time still counts as a loss.
Straight Up vs. Against the Spread (ATS)
Mode | How Picks Are Graded | Who Sets the Number |
Straight Up | The picked team just needs to win (or lose, in loser pools) outright. | N/A — spreads can still be displayed for informational context (on by default). |
Against the Spread — Splash-set | The picked team must cover the spread. | Splash's live, dynamically updating odds; they freeze at the spread lock time. |
Against the Spread — Commissioner-set | Same covering logic. | The commissioner manually enters a spread for every game. |
Other Levers Commissioners Can Pull
Lever | What It Does |
Entry Lives (mulligans) | How many losses an entry survives (1–18; default 1). A "Stop Issuing Lives After Week" cutoff can restrict mulligans to the early season. |
Team Use Limit | How many times the same team can be picked per entry (Once by default, up to Unlimited). The strategic heart of Survivor. |
Pick-Against Team Limit | Caps how often an entry can pick against (select the opponent of) the same team — prevents the whole pool fading one terrible team every week. |
Multi-Pick Weeks / Flexible Multi-Picks | Require 2–4 picks in chosen weeks, or set automatic rules ("if more than X% of entries are still alive by Week Y, that week becomes a multi-pick week") to whittle down big pools. |
Bye Pick | One free pass per season — a missed pick automatically consumes the bye and the entry advances. |
Contest Revivals | If every remaining entry is eliminated in the same week, everyone is revived and the contest continues (off by default). |
Tiebreakers | Default endgame is a co-winner split. The commissioner can instead enable a single-winner tiebreaker cascade. |
Summary: This is where Survivor gets its strategic texture. Entry Lives and Team Use Limit are the two settings every commissioner should think through carefully before launch, since they define how forgiving or brutal the pool is. The rest — pick-against limits, multi-pick triggers, Bye Pick, Revivals, and Tiebreakers — are optional tools for shaping how a big pool narrows down and how the ending gets resolved.