The most important thing to consider when joining pick ‘em type pools is to weigh the value of the payouts. Learn the payouts before joining, and always find out if the pub/office takes a cut of the money for running the pool. If you joined a pool with 400 people that each paid $100, you would have a $40,000 pot to divide into the 17 NFL weekly payouts, and (usually) top 5 best overall record prizes at the end of the year.  With a $40,000 pot for prizes, you’d figure the pub would take $5000 to run it, maybe more.
 Strategies:

Go for the Gold
  If the weekly payout is only 10 times your investment, I suggest playing very tight and plan for being in the top overall rankings, assuming that it’s not a winner takes all pool. In the example above, the pub/office is taking a $5000 cut to run the pool, and weekly payouts are $1000. Sounds great, but with 400 people in the pool and a huge pot remaining for the top overall prizes, you can play it safe and let everyone else kill each other and wreck their overall records. The goal is to get 70-75% of your picks right throughout the year. Of course your goal is to win every week, but by counting the amount of games you need to get right to reach 70-75% for each week, it then allows you to take the odd long shot to win the week. This strategy does work, although you need to ignore the overall pool standings until the last 3-4 weeks. Most people see the pool standings and think they need to take long shots to gain ground to get to number 1.
 
Roll the Dice
  In this scenario, we have the same type of pool but with a 15 times payout towards weekly winners. This is a totally different situation; that’s an extra $8500 going towards weekly winners rather than to end of the year payouts. I know it’s only 5 times more than the first example, but playing it safe wouldn’t make sense here. Your goal here would be to try to win each and every week. Although when trying to win each week, you have to have a more balanced attack when taking more long shots and not going too crazy. In every NFL week there are maybe 1-2 real upsets at best; when a team is a 3 point favorite and you call the underdog, that’s not much of an upset. Almost every week there are 1-2 games that even the best sports bettor would not have predicted.