Pursuit of perfection
While NFL teams were fighting for playoff spots and jockeying for seeding on the final weekend of the regular season, six groups were sweating millions of dollars in Circa Sports’ annual Circa Survivor contest. In the end, five entries made it through the competition unscathed, splitting the $18,718,000 prize pool to win $3,743,600. And poker players were heavily involved in Sunday’s celebration.
For the uninitiated, Circa Survivor is a classic NFL “survivor pool” contest in which players select one team to win their game each week of the regular season, plus two special holiday picks on Thanksgiving and Christmas. If your selected team wins that week, you move on. If it loses or ties, you are out. And entrants cannot pick the same team twice, so while players only have to make their selections week to week, some advance planning is necessary.
Circa Survivor has a $1,000 buy-in and no rake, with ten entries maximum per person. All entries that make it to end with a perfect 20-0 record split the prize pool equally. If all remaining entries lose in the same week (thus guaranteeing nobody makes it all the way through the season), they split the prize pool.
Going into the final weekend of the season, there were six entries remaining to try to nab part of the $18.7 million prize pool. Two picked the Vikings to beat the Packers, the latter of which was fielding a squad of almost entirely backups in a meaningless game, while the other entries selected the Jaguars over the Titans, the Bengals over the Browns, the Falcons over the Saints, and the Patriots over the Dolphins.
All won except for the entrant who went with the Bengals, so there was a five-way split for the jackpot.
Poker brains
Poker player and founder of RunItUp.com, Jason Somerville, was part of the “JUICY KEWCHI” team, one of the entries that had the title riding on the Vikings on Sunday. Speaking with the “Last Men Standing” podcast, along with teammate Fernanda Corriedo (who came up with the…interesting…team name), Somerville said he was “relieved and happy” that they were able to finish off the perfect season.
Galen Hall, who has over $7 million in live tournament earnings, including a $2.3 million win at the 2011 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event, revealed that he had a share of two winning entries. There is rampant speculation that he had a piece of many entries, but he has not spoken about that, nor even said which two championship entries were his. Regardless, getting two entries to the finish line is a heck of an accomplishment, since it’s almost impossible to even get one.
Texas poker player Casey Diener was on the “REAL BRO” team, pulling for the Jaguars to beat the moribund Titans. The Jags did it easily, but Diener was also excited to watch the Browns defeat the Bengals on a last-second field goal:
That kick eliminated the “PARTZ1” entry, earning Diener an extra $623,933 by virtue of splitting the prize pool five ways instead of six.
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