We pride ourselves in responding to community requests. But there is one requested feature we tend to avoid.
"Just tell me who to pick."
Type in your pool, get told the single best pick, done. A lot of tools in the space offer versions of this: the solver. We have a slightly different approach.
Think of Survivor Atlas the way the name says: an atlas, not a GPS. A GPS tells you to turn left, whereas an atlas shows you the terrain and trusts you to pick the route.
Part of what makes Survivor fun is that smart people can look at exact same information and come to completely different conclusions. One person sees a 35% popularity and thinks safety for this week to get to a juicy future week. Another sees an opportunity to get away from the field. Another person wants to preserve a team for Thanksgiving. We don't want Atlas to settle those arguments. We want to give you better material for these arguments.
Projections show you where we think the field is going, and you can decide whether to go with it or completely disagree. Our projections are one of the earliest reads to come out every week regarding ownership, giving the field something to react to over the intervening days before selection counts are released.
The Map lets you lay out a multi-week survival path and see how many entries share it. While we do offer an “auto-fill” feature so that if you have several picks down, and want to fill in the space with the biggest favorites, you can visualize that. We don’t bill this as a solver, merely a possible path.
The EV Calculator lets you change the assumptions yourself, because your pool's assumptions aren't ours to set.
Rankings and Filter give you ways to view what everyone else has left. In survivor, your opponents' constraints are often your edge.
None of these will tell you exactly who to pick, but using all of them will make you better at deciding.
A solver has to pretend your survivor pool is a math problem with one right answer. But your pool isn't one problem, it’s a whole game.
Your pool is not the average pool. The correct pick for a 12-person office pool where the winner takes $600 is genuinely different from the correct pick when you're one of 8000 entries still alive in a Vegas contest. Pool size, payout structure, how many entries you have left, which teams you've already burned… a solver may flatten that into assumptions. The more your situation differs from the assumed average, the more wrong the "right answer" becomes. Not to mention the variance week by week in your own risk tolerance and goals.
There's also a difference between getting a better answer and becoming a better Survivor player. If a solver gives you Team X and you choose Team X, you may have made a good pick but you haven't necessariy learned anything. We'd rather help you understand why Team X is interesting, what you're giving up by using them, what the field is likely to do, and what changes if your assumptions are wrong.
The skill in survivor pools is the decision. Reading your pool, weighing safety against leverage, planning a few weeks out, knowing when the field is wrong: this is the game. We like to build the instruments to let you read them and enjoy the thrill of navigation.
