You’ve joined a weekly NFL confidence pool (also called a pick ’em pool) in the office or with friends. Now what? What even is a confidence pool? How do I win a confidence pool? Don’t worry, we’re here to help with your confidence pool strategy.

How does a weekly NFL confidence pool/pick ’em work?

Let’s start with the basics. [Already know the basics? Skip to The Base Pick] No matter if you’re on ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, or other site, the fundamentals are pretty much the same.  First, you have to pick the team that’s going to win each game. That’s pretty simple. But, what makes a confidence pool different is not only do you pick the winner, you have to assign a “confidence” value to the game. If there are 16 games, you assign points from 1 to 16 to each game. If your team wins, you get the number of points you assigned to it. If your team loses, you get zero. There are some variations off this game, but this is how it works in most leagues.

Here’s an example from a Yahoo league:

Example schedule of games to be picked

You have a bunch of games, and you need to select one of the two teams. The first game here is Philadelphia against Atlanta. So in this case, you would select Philadelphia or Atlanta to win the game. But there’s also the “Confidence Points” column to the right. Here is where you set how many confidence points you want to assign to the game, from 1 to 16.

Selecting Philadelphia to win with 8 confidence points

You do this for the entire schedule of games, selecting all the winners and assigning a confidence point to it. So there you have it! That’s how you do it, now the question is which teams should you pick to win, and how many points should you assign to it? Check out our next post!