Las Vegas Football Contests 2026: The Overlay Math

The question comes around every August, and this year it arrived early. Is the Circa Million worth entering? Is the SuperContest?

There is an answer, and it is one division anybody can do on a phone. What makes it interesting is that the number you need will not exist until the final week. Registration for the Circa contests closes at 2 p.m. Pacific on Saturday, September 12. The Westgate SuperContest closes an hour later the same day. Between now and then, the thing that decides whether these contests are a good bet changes every time somebody signs up.

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💵 No rake is not the same thing as an edge

Circa takes nothing out of its contest pools. Westgate takes nothing either, and has not since 2021, when the old 8% administration fee came off. Both books are telling the truth about this. A house that keeps zero is unusual enough to be worth saying out loud.

None of that puts you ahead. A pool that pays back exactly what it takes in is a zero-expectation bet. You and everyone else put in a thousand dollars, the whole pile goes back out, and before you have made a single pick, your expected return is the thousand you started with.

One thing lifts a no-rake contest above that, and it is a guarantee the field fails to reach. Circa promises a fixed dollar prize pool. If entries come up short, Circa makes up the difference from its own money, and that shortfall gets split among everyone who entered. Free money, in the only sense the phrase ever honestly applies.

Which means every contest has a break-even entry count. It is the guarantee divided by the entry fee, and nothing else.

That last column is live. Circa posts a running entry count for all three of its contests on its own contests page, and those figures were read off it on August 6th. They will be higher by the time you read this.

Under the break-even number, you are collecting an overlay. At it or past it, you are getting your money back on average and playing a coin flip with paperwork.

📉 Circa has guaranteed $6 million four years running. The field has never shown up.

Here is the Circa Million, and every row reconciles against a $6,000,000 guarantee that has not moved since 2023.

Do the division yourself. Six million over five and a quarter million is 113.8%. Six million over 5,817,000 is 103.1%. The overlay was never a promotion or a gift. It was a target the field kept missing three years in a row: 726 entries, then 183, then 315.

The Million needs 6,000 sign-ups this year to close that gap. It has never got there. It went backwards last season, from 5,817 to 5,685.

Circa is doing something about it. For 2026 the entry cap doubled, from five per person to ten, while the guarantee stayed at six million for a fourth straight year. Read those two facts together, and you are looking at a book closing a leak on purpose. If the field clears 6,000 this year, the overlay is gone, and the Million pays exactly 100%.

🎯 Survivor looks like the bigger overlay this year

Circa raised the Survivor guarantee to $20 million for 2026. That is a real jump, and on paper it is now the softer of the two contests.

If Survivor draws the same 18,718 it drew last year, the pool pays $20,000,000 on $18,718,000 collected, which is 106.85%. Better than the Million's 105.5%. Every headline number says take Survivor.

I do not think it happens, and this year you can check rather than take my word for it.

Read the pace by comparing the same calendar day in both years, which is the one comparison that does not shift depending on when you open this. On August 3 last year, the Review-Journal put Survivor at 4,100 entries, and it finished at 18,718. On August 3 this year, Circa's counter read 4,768. Same date, one year on, and the field is running 16% ahead.

Carry that pace forward, and Survivor lands near 21,800, which clears 20,000 and pays exactly 100%. The pace can break, and a single-day comparison is one datapoint rather than a trend. But the direction is the wrong one for anybody hoping Survivor stays short, and the entry cap is ten with the option of ten more on a rebuy.

The Million is the one with a live shot at an overlay, because it is the one that has never made its number. It sits at 1,198 of the 6,000 it needs.

🧾 The SuperContest can never overlay

Westgate takes no rake, so the SuperContest pays back exactly 100%. There is no guarantee attached to it, which means there is no mechanism by which it can ever pay more than the entrants put in. Its expected value is 0.0%, and that is a structural fact, not a bad year.

Meanwhile the field has collapsed. The SuperContest drew 3,328 entries in 2019. In 2025 it drew 751, a 77% decline. At $1,500 an entry, that is a $1,126,500 pool for a contest that was the biggest in the country a few years ago.

You can prove the payback from the contest's own documents. Take the $1,126,500, subtract the $575,000 in-season bonus pool the rules set aside, and $551,500 remains for the overall standings. The rules give first place 42% of it. That is $231,630.00. The 2025 champion was paid $231,630.00. No rake, exactly as advertised, and exactly nothing above it.

🚗 What does a proxy actually cost you?

Both contests require you to register in person in Nevada and submit picks in person every week. If you do not live there, you need a proxy, and you still need to make the trip out to register.

So one Circa Million entry costs an out-of-state player somewhere between $199 and $250 on top of the $1,000. Watch what that does, using last season's 105.5% payback so the arithmetic has something real underneath it.

Read the first column and the last one together. A single-entry casual pays 12% to 16% for the privilege. A ten-entry player pays 4.9%, which is what he would give up betting the same games at standard juice anyway.

The proxy tax falls hardest on the smallest player in the room. A contest that looks like a lottery ticket from outside is, for the person most likely to treat it as one, the worst-priced version of it available.

🎲 751 entries, and almost no evidence that anyone was good

The 2025 SuperContest published its full final standings, so this is checkable rather than asserted.

The field averaged 48.93% against the spread across the season. That is worse than flipping a coin. Only 40% of entries finished above .500, and only 23% got past the 52.38% you need to break even at −110.

Then there is the spread of results. Across 735 complete entries, the standard deviation of wins was 4.62. Pure luck on 90 picks predicts 4.74. Observed variation came in below what chance alone would produce, which makes the implied skill component negative. Not small. Unmeasurable.

Benchmark the leaderboard against the field's own 48.9%, and the finishing positions at 2nd, 5th, 16th, 53rd, 133rd, and 282nd all land within a point of what luck by itself would deliver. Only the winner stands apart, at 3.5 points clear.

Four previous SuperContest champions entered the 2025 contest. They finished 30th, 86th, 282nd, and 657th of 751. The last of those went 37-51-2. Winning this thing once tells you very little about what happens the next time you try it.

Survivor deserves its own warning here, because the handicapping does not carry across. You pick one team straight up, no spread, no repeats, across up to 20 legs in 2026. Five entries out of 18,718 made it through last season, which puts an average entry at about 1 in 3,744. The correct pick is often not the likeliest winner, because surviving alongside thousands of other people means splitting with them. That is portfolio allocation against a crowd, and it is a different skill from reading a football game.

⏱️ What to watch in the week before September 12

This is the part that makes the piece worth reading in August rather than October.

You do not need me for this part. Circa publishes the counter itself, updated live at circasports.com/contests, and the Review-Journal tracks the same numbers through the final weeks.

Two numbers decide it. If the Circa Million is under 6,000 entries in the last few days, there is an overlay, and it is real. If Survivor is under 20,000, same. Above those counts, both contests pay exactly 100%, and the only reason left to enter is that you enjoy it.

Check late, because the pace is violently back-loaded and an early reading tells you almost nothing. Mike Palm, Circa's VP of operations, described the 2024 close as roughly 1,000 entries a day over the final six days. A contest sitting at a third of its target in mid-August is not necessarily short; it is normal.

Watching an entry counter is a strange way to decide a bet. It is also the only honest way, because nobody, including Circa, knows today what those fields will be.

One more thing about 2026: Circa doubling the Million's cap is a deliberate move to fill the pool. If it works, this was the last cheap year.

🏁 How I would play it

Suppose the counter cooperates. The Million lands under 6,000, and you are a Nevada resident with no proxy to pay. Positive expectation, no rake, no catch. Take it?

Run it against my bankroll rule, which sizes a normal play at 0.5% to 2% of your roll and reserves the top of that range for spots where you are close to even money.

A contest entry is not 90 bets. It is one bet that settles once, in January, and the settlement is almost always zero. In the 2025 Million, 98.24% of entries paid nothing at all. In the SuperContest, 97.34%. In Survivor, 99.97%. A 1.76% chance of cashing does not belong anywhere near the 2% end of that ladder.

So below roughly a $50,000 bankroll, a $1,000 contest entry breaks my own rule. It breaks it on a bet with positive expectation. Which is the whole point. The expectation being positive is not the same thing as the bet being correct for you, and a median outcome of nothing is what most people are actually buying.

If you have the roll for it, live in Nevada, and the counter comes in low, the Circa Million in an overlay year is one of the few genuinely good bets available to a recreational player. If you are flying in and paying a proxy for one entry, you are paying 12% to 16% for a ticket the arithmetic already answered.

I have documented more than 89,000 official picks since 2001, winners and losers, and posted every one of them. No casino guarantee is holding that record up. You can read it at my NFL picks page or work back through the full archive, and if you want my season, the NFL packages are here.

Contest terms, guarantees, entry caps, proxy pricing and the entry counts above are a snapshot taken August 6, 2026. The counts move daily and both contests close September 12. Confirm the current numbers with Circa and Westgate before you commit anything.