Ya boy is in an 18 week pick'em league where everyone gets 5 ATS picks per week. A win gets 10 points, loss 11 points and a push is 0.

I'm currently sitting in 5th and the way the math plays out, if first place has a bad week and I have a good week I could get first. Maybe I'm really overthinking this but it seems to me that there are 3 ways to look at how I should do my picks.

1) Simple- Pick my 5 best and hope everything shakes out.

2) Try to base picks off what I think the people ahead of me are doing and do the opposite.

3) Pick opposite bets for 4 bets and take my "lock" to avoid losing or winning a lot of ground.

Moving parts

1st-3300
2nd-1800
3rd-800
4th-400
5th-100 (buy-in)

Also it's the last week of NFL so it's pretty tough to handicap. I've been killing the others below me and the folks above me seem to either be dropping or not moving much. I possibly have an edge when the only picks available are NFL (college football regular season picks are live, no bowl games or conference championships.)

Option 1) leaves me little hope of getting 1st but 2nd and 3rd are live with a good week or bad week by those ahead of me. Given my possible edge in NFL this seems attractive but I'm not super confident handicapping NFL games this week.

Option 2) Seems speculative to figure out what the others are doing. 1st has been picking totals (mostly over lol) but tough to figure out what he's doing. Maybe put me on bad sides needlessly and drop me out of money. The person in first didn't get there being an idiot after all.

Option 3) This seems like a good way of assuring 5th or 4th but would take a miracle to hit 2nd and unlikely to hit 3rd place money which are bigger payoffs.

Like I said, it's entirely possible I'm overthinking this but it sort of seems like ICM type thinking could help. Any help or suggestions or even constructive flaming is appreciated, picks due Saturday before 1:00 PM EST. MODS- If this is the wrong forum, no animosity if you move it to its proper location.

If people in the league have some sort of a clue, you can do option 2 by just making the worst picks relative to the betting market ie if the contest has some team -7.5 and the market line is -10, take the dog +7.5. The dog +7.5 is a "bad pick" that will only win something like 43% of the time but when you are trying to catch up there is an advantage to being unique.

I think Yahoo may have a section where they show you what the most popular picks are, at least they do in the straight up pick'em pools.

what did your strategy end up being OP?

Interesting thought weenus, I see the logic.

I just picked my best 5. Went 2-3 eff the jets and steelers and myself for not pullig the trigger on the Cards! The whole league got slaughtered and I tied for 5th. No movement among those in the money (was tied heading into week 17). I think this is an interesting situatiom still amd wish i’d put some kore thought into it in the last few weeks