Circa Sports owner Derek Stevens announced guarantees of $8 million for Circa Survivor IV — an increase of $2 million — and $6 million for Circa Sports Million V as the popular $1,000 buy-in contests opened Thursday morning for the 2023 NFL season.
Stevens, along with Circa VP Mike Palm, made their annual appearance on VSiN’s “Follow the Money” program to publicize the much-anticipated guarantees as well as new rule changes from previous year.
See rules for both contests below, but the most notable changes besides the prize money:
- 10 entries allowed in Survivor, up from 6
- 5 entries allowed in Million, up from 3
- In Survivor, the Thanksgiving and Black Friday games are combined into one week and the Christmas Day schedule is its own week for a total of 20 weeks
Last season, both contests had $6 million guarantees with Survivor (which requires contestants to pick 1 NFL straight-up winner each week without using the same team twice) drawing a Nevada NFL contest record 6,133 entries. The record $6.133 million prize pool was split by two entries using the aliases of BROWNA and JED for record payouts of $3,066,500 as they went undefeated at 20-0 during the 18-week NFL season, plus bonus Thanksgiving and Christmas “weeks.” A third contestant, THE ENEMY WITHIN, was eliminated on the final day, but also shared an undisclosed amount with a pre-arranged chop among the remaining contestants.