Week 1 Survivor Breakdown

Welcome to week one of my Survivor strategy breakdowns! This is probably the most excited I’ve ever been for survivor contests because of Splash sports having massive overlay on their guaranteed contests with $100,000 to the winner. Their big $10 GPP is less than 20% full at the time of posting this. If you didn’t see my Discord post about this, it turns out my old FanDuel rep works there now and he hooked me up with a promo for the RGP community. He’ll add $10 to your account (within 24 hours) when you sign up for Splash and make a deposit using this link. If you like Survivor contests, you’re definitely gonna want to join these because there’s huge overlay on the 100k guaranteed prize pools.  My strategy to take full advantage of the overlay is to enter a bunch into all the contests. I plan to take about 70% of my entries down the optimal route, and 30% down a secondary route. My breakdowns each week will cover both routes until one loses. Then I’ll fork the entries that are still alive and continue writing up optimal/secondary routes based on the teams already used on the surviving entries. This should allow me to stay alive for a while, as long as both of my teams don’t lose in the same week. I’d encourage you to do at least two entries so you can follow along with both of my routes. If you do 5 entries, you can split them 3 & 2, and then my method would probably allow you to suffer 3 losses before you’re eliminated. If this seems too confusing, just read on and you’ll probably understand what I’m saying.  Note: I realize that at some point you’ll probably want to break off from what I’m doing to differentiate yourself, and I totally understand that. It’s an 18 week contest though, so I’d advise you to wait a while. Once you start using different teams, then my weekly writeups may not work for you if I’m suggesting a team that you already used. Should that happen, I’ll be happy to help you in Discord, but your life will be easier if you follow my picks for a while. I plan to tell you exactly what I’m doing all the way to the end. If you want to ride with me for 18 weeks and chop the 100k, I don’t mind at all. In Week 1, it’s extremely tempting to take 100% of my entries down the optimal path, because the correct choice is so clear to me. The Washington Commanders face the Arizona Cardinals and they are one of the biggest favorites on the slate. It’s highly unlikely that Washington will ever be close to -300 again this season. The key in Survivor is to save the best teams as long as you can. Using Washington makes this very easy. We can take a huge favorite in Week 1 without giving up any future options that we’d realistically care about. Howell looked very good in the preseason and we expect the offense to have success in this easy matchup, and the Cardinals offense doesn’t even have a starting quarterback named, so we feel pretty confident that Washington will take care of this one.  The rules of Survivor require you to use a different team each week, but that doesn’t mean you can’t target the same team repeatedly. The Cardinals are expected to be so terrible that our optimal path will probably entail playing their opponent quite often.  As tempting as it is to play Washington with every entry, they’re still the Washington Commanders and therefore we should stay the course and send about a third of our entries down the secondary path.  The correct choice for the secondary path is the Baltimore Ravens. They are the biggest favorites this week at around -500 on most books. Houston is expected to be very bad, and with a rookie QB at the helm it makes sense to pick on them in Week 1. The reason this is only the secondary option is because we’d rather save the Ravens for later in the season. They’re more likely to get us the Week 1 win, but Washington is still considered the optimal play because of how unlikely we are to want to use them in the future.  Regardless of which pick we feel better about each week, it’s important that we stay disciplined about splitting our entries. Upsets happen all the time, and if Washington loses, you’ll be really glad you played some of your entries safer with Baltimore. If you only have 2 entries, I’d split it with one using Washington and one using Baltimore.  These articles will get more complex as the season goes on because we’ll be assessing upcoming schedules and taking more risks, but in Week 1 with every team available and two large favorites, it’s pretty clear how we should play this. Early on you’ll see a lot of bad Survivor players taking unnecessary risks on games with close odds, hoping that the big favorites lose and they immediately knock out a big portion of the field. We want to let those players get eliminated over the first few weeks. Later on, once most of those entries have eliminated themselves, it will make more sense to take some risks. The remaining players will probably be people who took a similar path as us, and we’ll be able to predict ownership really well. There will come a time where it’s very clear which team will be used by over half the field, and that’s when we’ll take our shot. Week 1 is not the time. I know a lot of us like to go contrarian so I wanted to end it with this reminder to stay patient. It’s called Survivor for a reason....