Circa has been running the biggest NFL survivor contest in the nation the last several years, and it hasn’t been particularly close.
Survivor contests, simply: Pick one NFL team to win. If they win, you move on to the following week, where you can choose any team you haven’t chosen yet. If your team loses, you’re out. Last one standing wins — in the case of this year’s Circa Survivor — $20 million. Entries cost $1,000.
The biggest hurdle for would-be contestants? Per Nevada rules, you have to sign up in person, and your weekly picks need to be made in Nevada, either by you personally or via a proxy.
Now, there’s a usurper in town. Well, technically an out-of-towner, and it’s why they can go about with the whole usurping thing.
Splash Sports is offering a $21 million survivor contest in tandem with Polymarket, and it is being done online. Players in 35 states and Canada can participate, along with the same $1,000 entry. No flights to Vegas. No proxies.
There are a few wrinkles, the most notable being a handful of weeks where contestants have to pick two teams, not one.
And there have been a few complaints on social media about the contest, most notably the service fee of 7.5% (Circa doesn’t charge a fee), as well as the fact that the contest could conceivably be even bigger than it is.
But Splash Sports co-founder and co-CEO TJ Ross is taking it all in stride.
Big size
Let’s start with the fee, that 7.5% that has some folks grumbling.
“Our fee on a $1,000 entry is $75,” Ross said. “That’s probably the cab fare it would cost you to get to the airport to fly to Vegas. Not to mention what you spend along the way — flights, hotels, however you do at the tables. And the proxy is significantly more expensive. It’s not even close.”
His point: For whatever it runs you to get out to Nevada and back, you could buy two or three Splash entries and never leave the couch.
“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to make money from our business,” Ross said. He noted Splash isn’t exactly playing with house money here. If the contest doesn’t fill, the company eats the difference.
Which brings us to the second complaint — that the thing could have been even bigger.
“It’s easy for someone to say that when they’re not putting up the money themselves,” Ross said. He pointed out this is by far Splash’s biggest contest ever, a major jump year over year. Last year’s survivor guaranteed $2.5 million. This one guarantees nearly 10 times as much.
“We’re trying to find a happy medium with a number that’s big and exciting,” he said. “It could be the biggest contest on the planet, while also balancing the risk.”
Ross has been chasing this idea for a while. He told a story about getting invited to high-stakes contests back in his early 20s, the kind where you mailed cash to some guy in New Jersey and just sort of hoped for the best.
“It seemed like, my god, how do I know this guy is going to pay me out if I win and not take off to Aruba?” Ross said.
There had to be a better way. So Ross and his partners bought RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool, added more games, branded the outfit Splash Sports, and went to work.
Enter Poly
Ross saw a fit. People are already in the Splash app all season — making picks, checking the leaderboard — so why not show relevant markets right there?
He used a friend as an example. In a survivor contest last year, the friend took the Bengals in Week 18. They lost to the Browns. Had he hedged with a separate bet on the Browns, he’d have locked up a profit in his private contest no matter what.
“There’s a lot of things like that we can do,” Ross said. He talked to everyone in the prediction space before landing on Polymarket, and he clicked with CEO Shayne Coplan, who Ross said clearly knew sports and had used the platform himself.
Then there’s the wrinkle: the double-pick weeks.
That’s by design. Ross ideally wants just one winner.
“You don’t want to have too many winners,” he said. Splash projects somewhere between one and five. Ross said other contests can produce 15 to 20 splitting the pot. The double picks help whittle the field.
In the end, Ross keeps circling back to the same thing. He started playing these games as a little kid, sitting on his dad’s lap, going down the lines in the newspaper and circling winners.
“Over 60 million Americans play these games, and no one’s really innovated in the space in forever,” he said. “That’s our goal. Use these games to bring people together through sports.”
And $21 million is a pretty good way to get their attention.
