Pick a Winner: Your Guide to Circa Survivor and Circa Millions Pro Football Contests

Venture anywhere near Downtown Las Vegas and you can’t help but notice the towering Circa Hotel. Cool off from the stifling desert heat in one of six pools in their famous Stadium Swim out back while taking in a game or 10 on their giant screens. This relatively new player in Vegas has risen to prominence partly thanks to their increasingly popular football picking competitions.

Circa runs two big NFL contests, Circa Survivor and Circa Millions, each with a $1,000 entry fee. Pre-2019 Westgate ruled the roost here with their SuperContest. Contestants would pick 5 NFL games against the spread each week. The winner would get huge acclaim and a share of the pool. Westgate would get lots of ink too, plus lop an 8% rake off the top, and you can see why the contests were win-win. 

Circa entered the fray in 2019 with just the Millions, which replicated the Pick-5 structure of the SuperContest but added a bold stab at market share – $1 million guaranteed, No Rake. The contest would have a fixed minimum payout, regardless of the quantity of sign ups. 

“Yes, it was a way for us to make a name and get people on property and familiar with our brand given we were the new kid on the block” Circa Director of Operations Jeffrey Benson told Casinos.com.

Then along came 2020 and the birth of Survivor. It guaranteed $3 million to the winner while Millions paid out a total of $1 million, divided between a full season contest as well as quarterly contests and “booby prizes” for the worst pickers (who must enter picks every week to qualify). 

If either or both contests fail to sell out, the pools have an “overlay” and players have a built-in expected gain just by entering. Should the contests go over, the extra money stays in the pot. Of course the pandemic also hit in 2020, but Circa kept the contest running, and the rest is history. 

“Continuing to commit during the pandemic when the economy was unsure and uneasy and people couldn’t really travel was a HUGE gamble,” Benson said, “but we made it work.”

Big Guarantees and Overlays

As the popularity of the Circa contests has grown, so have the guarantees. But the book still sets the bars high. Circa guaranteed $8 million for Survivor in 2023, but oversold and ended up with $9,267,000 in the pool, ultimately divided amongst four winners. 

Millions on the other hand went out with a sizable overlay as Circa guaranteed $6 million in payouts but sold only 5,274 entries, requiring the casino to pump an extra $726,000 into the pot.

For Circa Survivor VI in 2024, which begins taking entries fees later this month, the payout rises to at least $10 million, while Circa Millions VI guarantees the same $6 million. Any thoughts of raising the Millions bar? 

“No,” Benson says with an lol. “We were perfectly fine keeping it at $6 million.”

Winning by Proxy

Contestants can play these sports betting games from anywhere, but they must physically sign up at Circa or a Circa-affiliated sportsbook in Nevada. (There are six of them.) You also need to enter the weekly picks from somewhere in Nevada, either in person or via the Circa Sportsbook app, which is available in Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, and Kentucky.

Not a Silver State resident and not planning a weekly trip to Vegas? No problem, you can arrange to have a proxy service enter your picks, for a fee of course, even if you are in a state without legal online casinos.

Circa does not provide recommendations here, but proxy service reps are ubiquitous at their sportsbooks and you can find them rated and reviewed online as well. Just make sure to have a proxy with you at signup if you plan to play from out of the state.

How Do Circa Survivor Contests Work? 

Survivor is a competition all NFL and betting aficionados are all likely familiar with – pick one NFL team to win a game outright each week. Get it right and you “survive,” get it wrong and … see ya next year, thanks for playing. 

As in most contests of this type, players can only use a team once all season. But Circa adds a twist. The four games on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday constitute their own week, as do the three Christmas Day/Boxing Day games. 

“We wanted to keep the core components of a traditional survivor contest intact while also offering some fun/difficult twists that made the contest harder and have more game theory,” Benson explains. “Doing so allows there to be less winners instead of not splitting a ton of ways. This is totally a Circa original.”

And it does make Survivor more interesting and challenging. Contestants need to map out the season and save at least one team from each of these holiday windows. The contest may end prior to Christmas, effectively Week 18 of 20, but do not count on that. Last year, four entries navigated their way to 20-0 seasons. Players can purchase up to 10 entries, and Circa Survivor V saw 352 contestants max out.

Game theory strategies thrive in particular within the multi-entry crowd. Do you take different paths early on with your entries? Do you pick them all the same and wait until late in order to lock in passage to the last few weeks? 

Secondary markets teem as the season progresses. The value of “surviving” picks explodes as the calendar churns and upsets abound . Says it’s Week 10 and 500 live tickets remain. Each remaining entry now has an intrinsic value of $20,000 ($10 mil / 500). 

That likely understates it, frankly, as Circa may have sold more than 10,000 entries and further, not everyone has the same teams available to pick in the remainder of the season. But if you can survive without using a couple marquis teams, you may be sitting on an even more valuable commodity. Players often sell “shares” of their tickets. Later on as the size of the remaining contestant pool dwindles even further, survivors make arrangements with each other to “chop” the ultimate grand prize in some fashion. Late in the 2023 contest, a professional poker player with a surviving entry loudly and publicly refused to chop at all. He then quickly lost. Karma!

All the fun and games here take place in the private marketplace. Circa only recognizes the original entry holder, though they will make some accommodations.

“Circa Sports doesn’t recognize any transfer or sale of ownership of a Contest entry,” Benson explained in language that seemed legal-department approved. “We pay the individual that is on the signup form and should that individual want to defer any or all of the taxable liability and the subsequent payout, we would have no problem accommodating that request by filling out a signed Form 5754 to give to both parties at the time of payout.”

How Does the Circa Millions Contest Work?

In Millions, contestants still pick five games against the spread each week. A win counts for 1 point while a push garners a ½ a point. The overall winner gets $1 million, the prestigious blue jacket and the pride of besting a really tough field. It literally came down to the 4th quarter of the final game last season with Matt Ste. Marie taking the crown with an impressive 62-27-1 (69.44%) mark. 

Circa pays out at least another $3.65 million for overall places 2-100. That required a score of 55.5 in 2023, or 61.7%, to cash. In addition there are $300,000 in prizes for top finishers each quarter, and a $100,000 seasonal “booby prize” and $50,000 for 2nd to last. 

If more than 6,000 entries sell, the prize pools all go up. There is a five-entry maximum and again, you can privately sell shares in your entry. Of the 5,274 total entries in Circa Millions V, nearly half (2,485) were single tickets while just 146 played the maximum 5 times.

Circa generally releases lines on Thursday mornings, and those contest lines freeze there, even though actual point spreads can and do fluctuate right up until kickoff. Entries are due Saturday afternoon, Vegas time, but proxy services have variable and earlier deadlines. All picks must get submitted at once, so anyone looking to play Thursday games needs to enter all their picks for the week before kickoff. Thanks to that, Thursdays routinely see the least play of any games.

So will Circa sell out in 2024 or are we looking at overlays in both contests? As of late July, the sportsbook still had a ways to go. 

Circa runs their “Ultimate Contest Weekend” on Aug. 22-24, and the NFL season itself does not kick off until early September. Further with edges like these, arbs will pounce and max out their entries. Time will tell, but I fully expect Circa will set more contest sales records in 2024.

(Image: courtesy of Circa Sports)