How I used 200 experts and Reddit's comment ranking algorithm to win my office NFL Pick'em Pool

 How I used Reddit's Comment Ranking algorithm and 200 Experts to win my Office NFL Pick'em Pool

Participating in my office's NFL Pick'em pool every year is a great joy. Last year, 2015-2016 NFL season. I didn't have a strategy and started 18th. By the end of the season, I was tied for 4th. I thought I could win this year if I had a consistent strategy.

And I won.

New England's incredible Super Bowl win over Atlanta put me in 1st place among 19 colleagues. I have a record of 172 of 265 correct choices.

How did I do it? I devised a system that used data collected from over 200 experts and a modified version of Reddit's comment ranking algorithm in order to win an edge over my peers.

My main thesis was: Each week, I would listen to the expert with a track record of success and then use the pre-announced picks of that expert as my own for week 2.

I was inspired by these winners-picking experts and followed their example to great success. I switched my allegiances as they jockeyed for position as the top-ranked oracle.

Even though I was flawed in theory my logic was effective in practice. Success among experts in the past did not guarantee future performance.

The result? The system that transformed thousands of expert forecasts into office bragging rights.

Gathering Expert Predictions

I would have to know data in order to find out which expert was picking the winners every week if I wanted to follow the advice of the most reliable.

NFL Pickwatch had exactly what I was looking for.

NFL Pickwatch records the picks and predictions made by NFL experts each week during the NFL season. Although most experts are NFL media analyst (hence their "expert") status, NFL Pickwatch also tracks the Vegas Line, ESPN user consensus, Microsoft artificial intelligence bot Cortana and algorithms like FiveThirtyEight’s Elo forecasts. According to NFL Pickwatch's founders, they "track, observe, and stalk (figuratively), every NFL expert across all networks and websites".

NFL Pickwatch provides weekly expert predictions going back to the 2014-2015 season. In August, I manually copied the 2015 and 2014 season pick data from NFL Pickwatch and put it into a Google spreadsheet. The weekly data look something like this. How to Find the Best Football Picks