🏈 Las Vegas Football Contests 2026: What They Actually Cost

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 1,383 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.

Winners Circle sells two tiers and the difference is the submission deadline. Silver wants your picks by Friday 11:59pm Pacific. Gold holds until Saturday noon, against Circa's own 2pm cutoff. That is $75 for about twelve hours, and it does not buy a better number, because the contest line is frozen Thursday morning and never moves. You are paying for Saturday injury news on a five-pick card.

So a single Circa Million entry costs an out-of-state player anywhere from $100 to $325 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.

Survivor is cheaper to proxy, because submitting one pick a week is a commodity. But it fills, which means it pays exactly 100% and there is no overlay to absorb the fee.

The SuperContest is the worst of the three. No guarantee, so no overlay is possible in any year, and the entry is $1,500 before anybody carries it to the window.

Read those three tables together. A single Circa Million entry runs anywhere from −4.1% to −20.4% depending on nothing but which service you hire. The spread between the cheapest proxy and the most expensive is $225, and at 105.5% payback the overlay everybody is watching the counter for is worth $55. Your choice of proxy moves four times more money than whether the contest overlays at all. An entry through the $100 service in a year with no overlay whatsoever beats an entry through the $325 service in a 105.5% overlay year, by eleven points.

Three of the four that handle the Million charge a premium for the first entry and discount everything after, so the single-entry casual is subsidising the syndicate. The proxy tax still falls hardest on the smallest player in the room. That player is also the one with the most to gain by shopping, sixteen points against five and a half for the ten-entry player.

This is the same argument I make about line shopping at sportsbooks. Two thousand bets at a 52% win rate loses you 14.5 units; the same two thousand bets, shopped for the best available number, wins 61.8. The picks never changed and the price did. Circa and Westgate don't charge a fee, so if you use a proxy, that's your vig.

💱 Somebody built a market for Survivor entries, and its buyers lost 43%

A site called Survivor Sweat runs a marketplace where Circa Survivor entrants sell percentage stakes in a live entry. One per cent, ten, fifty, ninety-nine. It also operates as a proxy service. The 2024 Survivor champion, playing as Vodka Johnny, took $1,783,250 as one of eight winners that year and says on the record that the service helped him sell a portion of his entry there.

So you can cash out mid-contest instead of waiting to win it all. Every completed sale is public, so this is checkable rather than asserted. I pulled all of them, matched each purchase against whether that entry went on to win, and totalled it up. There are 844 Circa Survivor trades across the 2024 and 2025 seasons, which is the marketplace's entire history.

Buyers spent $1,964,584 and got back $1,125,219. They lost 43% of their money.

The early number is the one that matters. In the 2025 season alone, 496 purchases worth $646,924 were made before November, and every one of those entries was dead by January.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Entering Week 3 of 2025, 16,963 entries were still alive and the pool was $18,718,000, so a live entry was worth about $1,103 and one per cent of it was worth $11.03. On September 16 and 17, one-per-cent stakes sold for $84, $110, $125 and $200.

So if you are in Survivor and still alive in October, the marketplace will pay you several times what your entry is worth. Selling into that is the only thing anyone has ever done in this marketplace that made money.

Buying cheap late does not work, which surprised me. Purchases from November onward returned 2.76x in 2024 and 0.07x in 2025. Pooled, they return 1.00x, exactly what a market with no rake should return. The seasons disagree because six of the eight 2024 winners had sold equity and only one of the five 2025 winners did, and there is no way to know in advance which kind of season you are in.

Two cautions. Liquidity is thin: on one September weekend a ninety-per-cent block went for $27.77 per point while one-per-cent slices fetched $84 to $200 within hours. You can sell a sliver at a premium; you cannot sell the whole entry at that price. And Circa is not part of any of it. Its rules say the registered contestant is the only person approved to collect a prize, and a payout gets split only when everybody named on an IRS Form 5754 appears in person together at a Circa window. Buy one per cent of a stranger's entry, watch it win $3.7 million, and you have no claim on the casino. You have a handshake.

🧮 What the tax does to the overlay

I am not an accountant and none of this is tax advice.

Federal withholding applies to gambling payouts over $5,000 that come in at 300 times the wager or more. A $3,743,600 Survivor prize on a $1,000 entry is 3,743 times the wager, so expect Circa to hold back 24% at the window, roughly $898,000 on that prize. You collect the rest and settle up at filing. Nevada has no state income tax, so nothing is withheld there, though your home state will want its turn.

The withholding is not the interesting part. Your $1,000 entry fee is a gambling loss, and a gambling loss only comes off your taxes if you itemize. From the 2026 tax year, only 90% of it comes off even then. So in the 98.24% of Million outcomes where the entry pays nothing, most entrants deduct nothing at all.

Run that through the overlay. Last season's 105.5% payback is a pre-tax number. Put a $1,000 entry through it at a 24% federal rate, for somebody who takes the standard deduction and has no other gambling winnings to offset, and the expected return lands around $806. Call it minus nineteen per cent. At a higher bracket it is worse. The 5.5% overlay everyone is chasing gets eaten several times over.

None of that is an argument against betting, and the same arithmetic does not apply to a season of picks. A bettor working a card all year has wins and losses landing in the same bucket, offsetting as they go, and settles up on the net. A contest entry is one bet that settles once. It produces a single large taxable event in the 1.76% of seasons it hits and a single non-deductible hole the rest of the time. The shape of the bet creates the tax problem.

Notice who it lands on hardest. Somebody who bets all season has other winnings to absorb the entry fee against. The person who buys one contest ticket a year and bets nothing else has none. That is the second time on this page the arithmetic has pointed at the smallest player in the room.

🎲 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 quarter 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 $325 for somebody to carry one entry to the counter, you are giving back four times what the overlay is worth, 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 and proxy pricing here were confirmed on August 9, 2026, and Last Men Proxy's pricing on August 12. The entry counts in the first table were read off Circa's counter on August 6 and move daily. Both contests close September 12. Confirm current numbers with Circa, Westgate and the proxy services before you commit anything.