In a standard survivor pool, one wrong pick ends your season. That is the whole game, and it is also the reason so many pools feel over by October: half the group is knocked out in the first few weeks and spends the rest of the season watching.
A 2 life survivor pool fixes that by giving every entry a second life. It takes two bad weeks to go out rather than one.
What It Gets Called
There is no standard name for this, which makes it harder to search for than it should be. All of these describe the same idea:
- 2 life pool or two life pool: the plainest description, and the one most people search for
- Mulligan pool: borrowed from golf, where a mulligan is a do-over
- Second chance pool: emphasises the extra shot rather than the count of lives
- Double elimination survivor pool: borrowed from tournament brackets, where two losses put you out
The Two Ways to Run One
Both give an entry a second life. They differ in where that life is spent, and the choice changes how your pool feels.
Mulligans: forgiven in place
A mulligan revives the entry where it stands. A losing week is wiped, the entry carries on in the main pool, and it can still win outright. One mulligan per entry is, in effect, double elimination: two bad weeks and you are out.
The catch worth understanding is what a revive costs. An entry that lost its pick already used up that team, so nothing extra is taken. An entry that simply missed the deadline never used a team at all, so one unused team is consumed on its behalf, otherwise it would come back with more teams available than everybody who actually played. The commissioner chooses whether that is the largest available favourite or the largest available underdog.
Second Chance: a runner-up bracket
A Second Chance bracket moves the entry sideways instead. On its first loss the entry drops into a runner-up pool and keeps picking there with its remaining teams. A second loss ends its run, and the last entry standing in that bracket takes second place.
The main pool still produces a sole survivor, so the shape of the competition is unchanged. What changes is that going out early means switching brackets rather than going home.
Which One Suits Your Group
- Choose mulligans if you want one clean competition where an unlucky week does not knock somebody out. Everybody stays in the same race.
- Choose Second Chance if you want a genuine runner-up finish, and a reason for eliminated players to keep picking that is separate from the main title.
- Run both if your group is large, and know how they stack. In a Second Chance pool, a first loss in the main pool drops the entry into the Second Chance bracket rather than eliminating it, so there is nothing for a mulligan to forgive. The mulligan only comes into effect when you take a second loss in the Second Chance bracket. In practice that is three lives, not two.
Does a Second Life Cost You the Title?
That is your call, and it is the question most commissioners forget to answer until January. A mulligan pool can easily finish with several entries still standing, and somebody has to decide whether the one that never stumbled beat the one that was forgiven twice.
By default it does not. Entries still standing at the end are crowned co-champions, whatever it took to get there. That is the traditional reading: you survived, so you won.
Or you can let the record decide. Turn on Decide the winner by record in your pool settings and the title goes to the fewest losses instead. Take a pool that ends with three entries alive:
| Entry | Default | By record |
|---|---|---|
| Sarah, 16-0 | Co-champion | Champion |
| Mike, 15-1 | Co-champion | 2nd |
| Dave, 14-2 | Co-champion | 3rd |
If two or more entries tie for the fewest losses, they share the win. Sarah and a second 16-0 entry would be co-champions under either setting, because they are genuinely tied and no rule you did not write should separate them.
A mulligan spent on a week you missed counts the same as one spent on a team that lost. Both are weeks you did not survive on your own, and the record treats them alike.
You can also show every entry's record on the standings, which is worth doing if the record is going to decide it. Paying out on a number nobody could see all season is how a pool ends in an argument.
Decide this before Week 1, and put it in your pool rules. The setting can be changed any time, including mid-season, but changing it in December means changing who wins after people have played eleven weeks expecting something else. Sunday Survivor prints the rule on your Pool Rules page so the whole pool can see which way it is set.
Setting One Up
Both are pool settings rather than a different kind of pool, so you pick them when you set your rules and the pool runs itself from there. Mulligans are a number, from none up to unlimited. Second Chance is a single toggle.
Worth deciding before your first deadline: both are game rules, and game rules lock once your first game kicks off so that nobody's season is re-scored halfway through.
Set up your pool at sundaysurvivor.com →
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a 2 life survivor pool?
A survivor pool where one wrong pick doesn't end your season. Every entry gets a second life, so it takes two bad weeks to go out instead of one. It is also called a two life pool, a second chance pool, or a mulligan pool depending on who is running it.
How do you give everyone two lives in an NFL survivor pool?
There are two ways, and they play differently. A mulligan revives the entry where it is, so a losing week is forgiven and the entry carries on in the main pool.
A Second Chance bracket moves the entry into a runner-up pool on its first loss, where it keeps picking for second place. The main pool still crowns a sole survivor.
Do two life pools take longer to finish?
Usually yes, and that is the point. A standard survivor pool loses roughly half its entries in the first few weeks. Giving everyone a second life keeps more people picking deeper into the season, which is why commissioners running a season-long group game tend to prefer it.
Does using your second life stop you winning?
Not on Sunday Survivor. An entry that spent a mulligan and an entry that never needed one are treated the same at the end, and survivors are crowned together as co-champions. Some commissioners add their own house rule, but the software does not impose one.
Related reading: what a Second Chance bracket is, how survivor pools work, and how to run a pool as commissioner.