Circa Survivor
Usually the only carnage to worry about when it comes to Thanksgiving is your digestive system. For those in Circa Survivor, it was not an enjoyable couple of days for other reasons.
All four underdogs won across the Thanksgiving “week” games, leaving just 49 entries alive in the Circa Survivor. That is a huge story in and of itself with 900 entering the week and just barely over 5% of those picking a winner. But, the other big story is that the Circa Grandissimo is finito. The inaugural contest had six entries left going into the Thanksgiving “week”, with three on the Ravens and three on the Eagles.
The news isn’t all bad for the Grandissimo contestants, as all of them losing meant that they split the $6.9 million pool, taking down $1.15 million each as some pretty good ROI for the $100,000 entry.
Circa Survivor Thanksgiving Carnage
The Eagles and Ravens accounted for more than 80% of the selections in Circa Survivor and those all went up in smoke, along with 78 on the Chiefs, 13 on the Lions, and two entries that didn’t get a pick in.
Of the Survivors, 28 had the Bears, 10 had the Bengals, 8 had the Cowboys, and 3 had the Packers. The implied value of each entry is now $382,000, a pretty good number based off of the $1,000 buy-in.
The craziest part, though, is that the super tight window to get in picks for “Week 13b”, as it’s being called, is that setting up partnerships, agreeing to equity splits, and finding potential investors was extremely limited. A lot of entries that make it this deep into the contest try to make it a point to guarantee getting something out of it making it this far.
When my partner Marc Goldberg from Spooky Express and I made it to the final 13 back a few years ago, we made sure to leverage our position the best that we could and also align with other entries that had teams available that we did not, especially with Christmas on the horizon. We may or may not know what happens with the remaining entries, but if we get some more upsets in Week 13b, then those talks will ramp up in a big way.
Circa Grandissimo Finale
In the rake-free, $100,000 Circa Grandissimo, six entries finished 12-1 to split the grand prize.
The first year of the contest brought in 69 entries and we’ll now wait to see how it does next year. The rules are the same as traditional Circa Survivor. The only difference is the much larger buy-in.
Given the lower number of entries, it isn’t all that surprising that the contest didn’t make it to the end, though the end coming as soon as Week 13 feels like a little bit of a shock. All of the larger Circa Survivor fields have gotten to the finish line, with eight winners splitting the prize in 2024, four in 2023, two in 2022, and five in 2021.
Circa Survivor Documentary
For those who don’t know, we’ve documented the Circa Survivor contest each of the last two years. “Circa Survivor: The Quest for $9.2 Million” was Season 1 and “Circa Survivor: The Quest for $14.2 Million” was Season 2.
Stay tuned and see what comes out after all the dust settles for this year’s Circa Survivor contests!
