How To Win Millions In NFL Pick’em And Survivor Contests

When it comes to sports betting, the NFL is king. More people bet the NFL than any other sport in the U.S. Sides, totals, moneylines, parlays, props, same game parlays – there are many different ways to carve up the NFL. But there’s one way to bet that could turn your small investment into a multi-million dollar jackpot. I’m going to explore how you could be the next millionaire in NFL pick’em and survivor contests.

Hi, I’m Jack from Unabated. I’ve been a professional gambler for over 20 years and while I’ve won millions from casinos and sportsbooks, most of what I did could very much be described as “Get Rich Slowly.” In fact, I’ve said it before that sports betting is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes study and dedication to find an edge and exploit that edge.

However, by early January there are going to be a few more freshly minted millionaires that hit it big by winning a season-long NFL contest. If you want to get the leg up on your competition in these pick’em and survivor contests I’m going to explore the different contest types, where to find the big money contests, and how you can beat them.

NFL Pick’em and Survivor Contests: A Primer

Let’s start by describing the two major types of contests. Pick’em and survivor. A pick’em contest requires you to pick the winner, against the spread, of a set number of games each week. At the end of the season, the person who has the best record wins. Prizes are also paid to runners up. A survivor contest, as it sounds, is a winner-take-all contest where contestants pick one team each week to win straight up, no spread. Once they use a team, they can’t use it again during the season. Whoever survives the longest, wins.

Large-scale versions of these contests can draw over 10,000 participants. The more contestants the lower your chance of winning of course. But that doesn’t make them bad bets.

The most prestigious of these contests are held in Las Vegas. The Westgate SuperContest is the granddaddy of football contests, it’s a pick’em contest. Meanwhile Circa Million and Circa Survivor have rocketed up in popularity. You don’t have to be in Nevada to enter your picks, but you do need to go to Las Vegas to sign up and use a proxy to put your picks in for you each week.

If a summer trip to the desert isn’t in your cards this year, there are large scale contests run at DraftKings as well as upstart Splash Sports. You’ll need to check on the legality of entering those contests in your state or province.

Fame, Cash and Expected Value

The allure to most bettors entering these contests is that this is a perfect opportunity to risk a little and win a lot. Gamblers love doing that. It’s why Powerball and Mega Millions are so popular. But these pick’em and survivor contests also appeal to sports bettors because a season-long contest gives you a lot of bang for your buck. If played well, you get season-long participation and activity for one fixed price.

These contests also offer a very real possibility of your 15 minutes of fame. Past winners of large contests like the Westgate SuperContest or Circa Million and Survivor are treated like celebrities in the sports betting world. Some have launched businesses from their success. Others just enjoy the bragging rights.

But the biggest reason these contests are appealing to all types of bettors is that they’re typically +EV, or positive expected value. In the case of Circa, they have a guaranteed prize pool for both Circa Million and Circa Survivor.

Overlays and Dead Money

In the past few years, there have been some hefty overlays in those contests. Meaning they paid out more than the sum of the entry fees. However, almost all these season-long pick’em and survivor contests end up being +EV because an amazing number of contestants fail to put in their entries at some point during the season. Last year 73 people missed putting in a Circa Survivor entry at some point during the season and were instantly eliminated. That was $73,000 more of dead money added to the prize pool.

Other contests get similar amounts of dead money. It definitely helps to make these contests theoretically profitable for all skill levels.

This is Greg Jones, one of our subscribers at Unabated. Greg runs a production company in Southern California that makes commercials. He likes betting the NFL and tennis but he’s far from a professional. He’s been entering Circa Survivor since its inception in 2020. In the first three years of the contest he’s failed to make it past Week 1.

Undeterred, Greg entered Circa Survivor in 2023 with four entries. He opted to change up his early season strategy and not try to employ as much game theory early on. That change worked and Greg finally made it past Week 1. More on Greg in a minute, his story is a wild ride.

When it comes to being successful in these season-long contests, whatever the format, pick’em or survivor, there’s a definite plan you can follow. I’m a fan of alliteration, so I’ve turned it into the four P’s of your pick’em and survivor contest plan: Participation, Probability, Process, and Path

If you keep these four P’s in mind, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of your fellow contestants.

Participation

Let’s start with Participation. The contestants who didn’t submit a week’s entry on time definitely failed this point. It’s very important that you understand all the rules in the contest you are entering. What is the submission deadline? How are Thursday games treated? Are there any nuances in the schedule that you need to keep in mind?

For instance, in Circa Survivor, Thanksgiving and Christmas are treated as their own weeks on the schedule. You have to make sure you have teams available that play on those days.

It’s very simple, know the rules and make sure you are always available to participate.

Probability

Next is Probability. In a survivor contest, your probability might be straightforward knowing that you have to survive the entire season to win a prize. However, in a pick’em contest there are often mini-contests over the course of the main event.

At the popular SuperContest run by Superbook, there are 11 mini-contests during the season in addition to the one overall full season winner. Circa has quarterly prizes in addition to booby prizes for the contestant who ends with the worst record both quarterly and full-season.

Check out all the different ways you can potentially win in a contest, but don’t get too hung up on a mini-contest prize. Winning the big prize is ultimately the most important target to shoot for.

One more thing about probability and survivor contests. You need to keep in mind later season probability. A team you might like in Week 1 might be a better fit later in the year. However, you also need to factor in getting that far and then how injuries could affect the trajectory.

That’s a big reason why we built a Survivor Optimizer at Unabated. It allows you to transfer power ratings into probability and then optimally map the rest of the season. You can also see what your opponents have done over the course of the season. It works with all the major survivor contests at Circa, DraftKings, and Splash Sports.

Process

That brings us to the next “P”: Process. You see in any contest there’s going to be an inherent basic strategy that a lot of the contestants all follow. In a survivor contest, you’ll find most people like to take the biggest betting favorite that week.

Another common strategy you’ll see is to avoid picking a Thursday night football team. Something about being the first one out in a given week just feels more humiliating. You’ll find very few people choose a Thursday team. You can use those two things to your advantage when trying to separate yourself from the pack.

Meanwhile, in a pick’em contest, a popular strategy is to find value in stale lines. The contest lines don’t move with the market. They are set mid-week and remain set at those numbers through the weekly deadline to submit picks. If you pick just the five lines that moved the most by the deadline, you’ll find yourself in a pretty congested pack of other contestants who are doing the same..

A big part of your process in a mass contest like this is knowing when to stay with the flow of traffic, and when to attempt to pass them by making your move. When trying to pass, you need to focus on being on games your opponents won’t be on. And if you find yourself really needing to slingshot past the pack, you may need to take contrarian positions and bet opposite the stale lines you know they’ll be picking.

With 90 total selections in most of these pick’em contests, you have time to find the right opportunity to make your move. But it can be tough to overcome too large of a deficit as the season winds down.

Path

That brings us to the endgame strategy, and this is where you potentially have the biggest edge over your opponents. It’s your Path to the big prize.

You’ll find that a lot of people would much rather play it safe when they get deep into a contest like this. In a pick’em contest, they want to just finish in the money. In a survivor contest, they want to split the winnings with the remaining contestants as early as possible.

However, knowing your Path is extremely valuable. How could things fall where you have the largest possible expected value?

In a pick’em contest, that might mean more contrarian thinking or identifying games your remaining opponents tend not to utilize. Or maybe it means controlling your lead by picking games where you stay in lock-step with your opponents.

In survivor it means knowing what your opponents have left and what gives you the most chance to be a sole survivor if a deal to split the winnings isn’t on the table.

Path in Practice

As the season went on last year, Greg utilized the Unabated Survivor Optimizer to make an epic run deep into the late weeks of the season. He kept an eye on which teams he would need to get through the holiday weeks in the Circa Survivor season schedule.

Heading into the Thanksgiving games, Greg had kept alive the upstart Detroit Lions to use on that day. Earlier that week, Greg had a personal tragedy when his mother passed away. He wasn’t in a clear mind when he accidentally selected Green Bay instead of Detroit in their Thanksgiving matchup.

But the Green Bay Packers went on to upset the Lions 29-22. That brings us to the other intangible you need to win these mega contests – luck. I’m sure you already knew that luck was a big part of it. But Greg went on to survive all 20 weeks and take down a massive prize with three other contestants who survived the entire gauntlet.

I like to think Unabated and his Participation, Probability, Process, and Path had a big impact on winning, but in the end, if he hadn’t misclicked that entry for Thanksgiving, he wouldn’t have won over $2 million dollars.

It reminds me of the famous quote, another P if you will, Pasteur. Louis Pasteur famously said “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Chance was on his side but he had definitely prepared well.

Want to learn more about the Survivor Optimizer and other Unabated tools, sign up for a one-on-one demo today and get a free five-day trial of Unabated Premium.