Questions people actually ask

One. You pick a single team you think will win, and if they win you move on to next week.

The one exception is after a tie — see the tie questions below, which are the part everybody gets wrong.

No. Once you have used a team, they are gone for the rest of the season, win or lose. This is the whole strategic tension of survivor: burning Kansas City in Week 2 feels great until Week 14.

Yes, and it is worth doing if you are going to be away. Pick any week that is loaded.

A future pick reserves that team. If you try to use them sooner, the app will tell you they are already committed to a later week rather than silently letting you double-book.

Any time before the pick locks. Tap your selected team again to remove it, or just pick someone else. Once it locks it is final.

12:55 PM Eastern on Sunday for the main slate.

But any game kicking off earlier locks separately, five minutes before its own kickoff. A Thursday night game locks Thursday. A London game at 9:30 AM locks at 9:25 AM.

Every game on the pick screen shows its own lock time. Do not rely on the Sunday deadline if you are picking a team that plays before Sunday afternoon.

The server decides, not your browser. Your clock, your phone's timezone and a slow connection all fail in the direction of thinking you had more time.

That said, if something genuinely went wrong — the page hung, the app errored — email the commissioner. There is a way to correct a pick, it is logged, and it is there precisely for this.

You are not eliminated for forgetting. You are assigned the strongest available favourite — the biggest favourite by the league's locked spread among the teams you have not used.

This is deterministic, not the commissioner's opinion: same inputs, same answer, every time. It is often a fine pick. It is never a pick you chose, and it burns that team for the rest of the season.

No. A tie keeps you alive. But it raises the price of staying alive: next week you must pick 2 teams and they must both win.

Two separate teams, two separate games. If either one loses, you are out.

It doubles again. Each tie multiplies your requirement by 2.

Owed 2, one tied and the other won → you owe 4 next week. Owed 2 and both tied → you owe 8. This escalates fast, which is the point: a tie is a reprieve, not a free pass.

You are out. Any loss ends your entry, regardless of what the other picks did. A loss is never cancelled out by a win or a tie elsewhere.

That is a loss. There is no Week 5 to pick two winners in, so the reprieve has nowhere to go. You do not advance on a tie.

Depends which entry you bought.

$80 entry: you get 3 rebuys included, free, usable through Week 8. After that week they expire whether you used them or not, and you cannot buy extras.

$20 entry: unlimited rebuys, but you pay each time and only through Week 5. Week 1 costs $10; Weeks 2–5 cost $30.

No. This is the single most common wrong assumption in the league.

Your used-team history follows you for the whole season. If you burned six teams before being eliminated, you come back with those same six gone. A rebuy buys you back into the game, not a fresh start.

No. A rebuy resets you to one pick per week. The doubled requirement died with the entry that incurred it.

A paid rebuy activates when the commissioner confirms the money arrived, not when you send it. Included ($80 entry) rebuys are instant because there is nothing to confirm. If it has been a while, nudge them — PayPal notifications get buried.

Entry fees go to the commissioner's PayPal and back out to the winners. Nobody takes a rake. There is no house cut, no fee, no administrative skim.

The app itself never touches money in either direction. It works out who is owed what and keeps the record; a human sends every payment by hand.

After any week, any survivor can propose splitting the pot. It only happens if every remaining survivor agrees — one no and it is off, and the season continues.

Silence counts as no. If you do not vote before the next week kicks off, the proposal dies.

Yes, and this has happened before. Three left, two want to stop, one wants to play on — so the two paying people give up some of their share to buy him out.

Propose whatever numbers you all agree to. The only hard requirement is that the amounts add up to exactly the pot. It still needs everyone's yes.

The pot splits evenly between everyone still alive. If it does not divide evenly, the odd cents are distributed rather than dropped — the payouts always add back up to exactly what was collected.

Once the season is settled, the commissioner sends each payment manually and ticks it off. If you are owed money and have not seen it, ask — there is a checklist and it will say plainly whether yours has been sent.

Everyone's picks appear once picks lock — 12:55 on Sunday for the whole slate, earlier for a team playing before then. A Monday night pick locks Sunday along with everything else, so it is visible then too.

Before then, standings still show whether someone has picked — “pick made, hidden until it locks” is deliberately different from “no pick yet”. You can see who is dragging their feet without seeing their hand.

The league uses a spread frozen on Thursday. It never moves afterwards, even if the real line does. That frozen number is what decides default picks, so a line that drifted over the weekend cannot retroactively change a decision that was already made.

No. Your team just has to win. Spreads are shown for information and are used only to rank default picks for people who missed the deadline.

Email the commissioner. Corrections are possible and are logged with a reason — there is a real audit trail, so raising it costs you nothing and a genuine mistake can be fixed.