Inside the world of high-stakes NFL survivor pools: Las Vegas, 'Meatball Brothers' -- and a $20 million prize
In the heart of Las Vegas, bettors try to do the unthinkable: turn $1,000 into $20 million throughout the NFL season.
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LAS VEGAS -- JOSHUA NORTHCUTT STEPS inside the sports betting temple that is the Circa Resort & Casino in the heart of downtown. He walks past the iconic neon figure of Vegas Vickie and into Circa's famed sportsbook, a monument to the sports betting experience with its stadium-style chairs and a three-story tall screen showing the sports action of the day.
Northcutt holds $1,000 cash in his hand. The 36-year-old aircraft parts lead traveled from Cincinnati to the 2026 Ultimate Contest Weekend to throw his hat in the ring for potential life-changing money -- over $20 million. He's processed his bankroll for the season and has already subtracted the $1,000 entry fee for Circa Survivor, hoping it is a worthy investment of his "fun money." Still, having just bought a house with his girlfriend and child, there are some nerves as he approaches the betting window.
The competition attracts clientele from all walks of life. Professional poker players mingle with retired golf buddies pooling money together; a first-time player like Northcutt can share the spotlight with celebrities such as Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux and UFC president Dana White, who both entered the contest in 2025.
"Just the challenge of it specifically with this contest, I guess competing against a lot of the experts just to see where I compare on a level to them," Northcutt told ESPN of why he wanted to enter. "Should I really even be doing this? Is this a waste of money?"
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A longtime staple of pools run by friends, family or coworkers, the survivor contest format is one of the most enduring forms of football betting. But here, Circa Survivor has positioned itself at the forefront of the NFL betting contests.
The premise is simple enough: Pick one NFL team to win outright each week (including two holiday mini-weeks) with the caveat that one team cannot be picked twice. Lose, and you're out. Survive to a perfect 20-0 record and you claim a share -- or all of -- at least a $20 million top prize.
"The idea of turning $1,000 into a share of millions is obviously everyone's dream in gambling," Jason Somerville, a poker pro who won the contest in 2025 as part of a team, told ESPN.
"It's sort of like the World Series of Poker main event in terms of you're trying to win the big one. There's certainly a lot of that sort of aspirational element that's nice and in sports betting, you don't really have that that often."
Pro football survivor contests are experiencing a boom akin to poker in the mid-2000's, in some respects due to the existence of Circa's flagship competition as well as the ease of access to online organization platforms, which are beginning to leak into the high-stakes world themselves. As of the second day of Circa's Ultimate Contest Weekend -- when the company invites potential contestants to sign up -- there were over 14,000 entries.
As the big games have grown and word-of-mouth has spread, more football fans are being exposed to the "incredibly elegant, beautiful design," as Galen Hall, a pro poker player and 2025 Circa Survivor winner, puts it.
"The survivor format, it's so simple that anyone can get into it. It doesn't take knowing a bunch of extra stuff except who you want to win and who you want to lose," said Gabe Patgorski, another Circa Survivor champion and founder of research website Survivor Atlas. "There's something where it's like in our nature as humans, there's some natural instinct of just surviving where the format is tapping into something more natural than any other gaming format there is.
"It's so much simpler and it resonates with something deep in us more so than fantasy sports or poker or sports betting ever could."
The "Meatball Brothers," top, in their blue winners' jackets, are Colby Strilaeff, Carson Williams, Angelo Grande and Paul Czyz. Details of a prized winners' jacket, bottom, are shown. Roger Kisby for ESPN CIRCA'S LEADERSHIP AIMS to find ways to adapt to the competition (such as the introduction of the holiday mini weeks) yet keep it true to this simplistic nature, according to Circa Sports director of operations Jeff Benson.
"We wanted to figure out how to make the contest harder but not take away the core tenets of what made survivor, survivor," Benson told ESPN. "We've gotten pretty lucky from a scheduling perspective that things have really worked out that over the years we've been able to build from 17 games to 20."
The first contest in 2020 attracted 1,390 entries with 35 going the distance; the 2025 edition brought in 18,718 entries with only five making it the whole way. The changes had the desired effect, with veteran players calling the holiday slates easily the most stressful time of the season. Since the schedule expanded, players have adopted intricate strategies.
"As a casual football fan, you can start picking, look at it every week and spend 10 minutes on it, and it's enjoyable and fun. Or you can do like tens of thousands of hours of analysis and really get some reward from that," Hall said. "To pick up and start playing, there's no barrier. But the amount of complexity that's actually involved in playing it well is incredible."
Hall believes there are different levels to thinking about survivor picks, ranging from picking a team for football reasons alone, to modeling out future picks, to understanding the expected value (EV) of your entries with the possibility of buying, selling or splitting equity on them. Additionally, Hall fully recognizes the luck factor as well.
"It's a good balance," he said. "If it's too much skill, the casual players get chopped up too quickly and don't come back. And then if it's too much luck, you might as well play the lotto."
Knowing the value of one's entry and treating it like a commodity is essential for many high-level players: The longer the contest goes on, and the more players are eliminated, the more each entry's value theoretically increases above the initial $1,000.
There are third-party marketplaces that will facilitate the purchase or sale of partial or full entries, and near the end of the season, players will sometimes negotiate amongst each other to chop the pot to ensure they each get a share of the grand prize. Players will also often hedge their picks, with Circa even offering lines of credit for big bets to guarantee players don't go home empty-handed.
Players realize that they increase their potential equity in the top prize by having more entries -- and that they can gain more entries by teaming up.
A player hands in his submission for the contest. Roger Kisby for ESPN The Circa Survivor rules allow each individual player to have up to 10 entries in their name, but there is no rule saying they can't take those 10 entries and combine them into a group with however many other players. From there, with all the money pooled, players can either collaborate on a strategy -- as was the case with Somerville and Patgorski -- or allow one player to make the picks for everyone, as Hall did to get two entries across the finish line last season.
"Even though those people have a better chance of winning, they're paying such a big multiplier for it that a lot of their picks end up being minus EV because they're trying to cover multiple different scenarios," poker pro and Circa contestant David Baker told ESPN. "So you're getting more leverage on some of them. Some of them try to spread it out so much that it's basically impossible for them to get too many of them to advance."
And just because it's less likely for a single entry to win doesn't mean it's impossible.
"They still can't stop an individual from going 20-0," Patgorski said. "That's kind of the great equalizer."
Many of the syndicates are made up of groups of friends who treat it as a communal betting experience. In 2024, a group of six coworkers at a meat processing company pooled together their financial resources to buy three entries and appropriately named their team "The Meatball Brothers."
After a notoriously nightmarish first three weeks that saw the most popular pick lose each week and only 4.5% of the original entries remain, the Brothers were down to one entry. But that one made it all the way to Week 18, when the team came to Vegas to watch their pick win. Each member was guaranteed over $300,000 in contest prize money, plus additional winnings from a spread hedge against the pick.
"We're a bunch of average dudes and we won this whole goddamn thing," said Carson Williams, one of the Meatball Brothers.
A view of Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas. Roger Kisby for ESPN WHEN VISITORS COME to the area of southern Nevada collectively known as Las Vegas, they usually hop off the plane at Harry Reid International Airport and make their way to the famed Strip, technically located in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester. The Strip has created much of the public perception and lore surrounding Vegas, but about six miles away from the glitz and glamor, Derek Stevens built his casino empire on Fremont Street, the historic center of Downtown Las Vegas.
It's here that Circa broke ground and instantly became one of the most popular resorts in the area.
After years of buying up old casino resorts in the area and refurbishing them, Stevens opened Circa in 2020. His goal from the beginning was to make it a central hub for sports bettors and knew he could quickly build that reputation by running a traditional NFL handicapping contest in the mold of the Westgate's famed SuperContest, so the casino launched Circa Million in 2019. A year later, it started Survivor.
"We hit lightning in a bottle, [and] Circa Survivor just absolutely took off," Stevens said. "I did it just with my buddies 35 years ago and I thought, 'Oh my God, what a game.' So I've been playing for a long time and there's nothing like the energy or adrenaline you get. Even when you make a bet, there's nothing like a survivor pick."
To further push the envelope, Circa launched Grandissimo in 2025, a $100,000 per entry version of Survivor that garnered 69 entries in its first season.
All of Circa's contests are "no rake," meaning that all of the money from entry fees goes directly into the pot and the house does not take a cut. In that sense, Circa does not profit directly from the contest and even spends considerable money marketing it and putting it on, according to Stevens and Benson.
But Circa does make plenty of money back in ancillary purchases at its property and builds valuable brand power, mostly thanks to Nevada state laws. The Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) dictates that any organization running a sports pool in the state must have its patrons register for the contest and place their weekly picks in person, meaning that every participant in the tournament must make the pilgrimage to Downtown Las Vegas before football season if they want to participate.
"We said, 'OK, let's create some great experiences throughout the summer for people to come to Las Vegas,'" Stevens said. "It's a massive deal when you think about how many people enter the contest, and that means in the slowest time of the year in Vegas, shoot, we're going to have 35,000 entries [between the three contests] in July, August and early September."
Derek Stevens, owner of Circa, at the 2026 Ultimate Contest Weekend in front of the Vegas Vickie sign. Roger Kisby for ESPN It's especially relevant amid the city's pronounced tourism slump, which saw the city host 3.1 million fewer visitors in 2025 than the year before, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
Circa and Nevada's insistence on keeping pro football contests in-state also gave rise to proxy services. While it is illegal for someone to make a bet on someone's behalf, the NGCB has made an exception for the contests, allowing proxies to make picks for contestants each week, so long as the player signed up on their own first.
Between 85% and 90% of Circa Survivor participants use a proxy service, according to Circa. Matty Simo and Toni Law -- who co-own FootballContest.com, one of the players in the proxy industry -- recognize the value the in-person aspect brings not only to their business but to Circa's.
"If you go back 30-some years or whatever, to when the SuperContest and some of the other casinos in Las Vegas started doing football contests, the main purpose, especially since there's no rake involved, is that they want to bring people into the property," Simo said. "I don't think anybody would really know much about Circa if it wasn't for the contests and the ability to see the property, see what it's all about.... It's just a huge marketing opportunity for them."
Fans watch the games at the Circa sportsbook. Roger Kisby for ESPN FOR ALL OF the prestige and spectacle the in-person Las Vegas football contest experience provides, there's an argument to be had that it's simply old-fashioned and behind the times in a digital world.
In June, peer-to-peer gaming platform Splash Sports and prediction market Polymarket announced a new partnership that would see them host a $1,000 per entry pro football survivor contest that will notably guarantee $21 million in prize money.
The contest will allow up to 150 entries per user and will feature six "double pick" weeks where players must select two teams instead of one, an apparent foil to Circa's holiday mini weeks. It will also feature a built-in marketplace for buying and selling partial or full entries and is available to play online across much of Canada and 35 U.S. states (but, of course, not in Nevada).
TJ Ross, Splash's co-founder and co-CEO, says he has been a fan of survivor since he was a kid, citing the format's "minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of sweat." When he saw the opportunity to partner with Polymarket -- with its bountiful financial heft -- to bring a challenger to the market, he knew he had to take it.
"I think the contests in Vegas created structure around it and what we're really trying to do is democratize it so anyone can play from anywhere," Ross said.
The Splash survivor contest is a natural competitor to Circa's product, but many of the latter's veteran players don't necessarily see it that way. Hall, Patgorski and Somerville all say they'll probably throw at least an entry or two into the Splash contest in addition to their usual helping of Circa entries, though not every potential player will have that luxury.
These veterans ultimately believe the top players will always keep coming back to the original big contest. Patgorski recalls that Chris Moneymaker's win at the 2003 World Series of Poker main event sparked an explosion in the poker industry, with online platforms all offering massive payouts to try and ride the wave.
"The main event in Las Vegas has always been the best poker tournament in the world," Patgorski said. "My gut says it's kind of going to be like that in survivor, where Circa is always going to be the best one to play."
Joshua Northcutt sits for a portrait in the Circa sportsbook. Roger Kisby for ESPN If there's one thing on which Circa can continue to pride itself on, it's the community it created when it compels its players to convene during the oppressively hot Nevada summer. In the more tolerable winter, some of them come back for a celebration of victory and the fitting of their blue winner's jackets. Or on the other hand, a dirge of defeat, as one player, Pete Tarsiewicz, experienced two years in a row when his entry lost in Week 18 of the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
"It's just something we have circled on our calendar every year," said Aman Dhaddey, a software engineer from Vancouver, who plays Million. "It's one of those things: birthdays, Christmas, Circa entry."
This year's Ultimate Contest Weekend felt like a convention or reunion, where long-lost friends met to catch up, gamble and talk about the upcoming season. The Meatball Brothers, who strengthened their bond with each other through the game, call the community which plays the contests a family.
Northcutt is thrilled to join, which he had at first only experienced from afar through listening to the "Sports Gambling Podcast." Here in Downtown Las Vegas, he's rubbing shoulders with those media personalities and pro bettors, finalizing his Week 1 pick -- possibly the Los Angeles Chargers over the lowly Arizona Cardinals, as many contestants are also eyeing -- and planning out a path to glory.
"I am competing against experts, but it's also average fans like me coming out and enjoying it and just carrying on conversations, meeting new people," he said. "It's a little bit outside my box to do this, but I enjoy it. It's hard not to get a feel of the excitement that everybody's having because we all got the same chance."
