A group of poker players were locked in for a big sweat this weekend with over $18 million at stake on the last week of NFL games in the Circa Survivor VI contest.
The Circa Survivor contest is relatively simple. Pick one team to win and if you lose, you’re out. If you win, you move on to the next week. Survive all 20 weeks and you earn a share of the winner-take-all jackpot. You can only pick each team once, so surviving to the end depends on careful planning and a great deal of luck.
Six entries entered the final day of NFL action and five teams survived to see the money at the end of Sunday in a live sweat at Circa Sportsbook in Downtown Las Vegas, each winning $3,743,600. Among them were several poker players, including Jason Somerville, Galen Hall, Casey Diener, and Matt Graham. Hall, who won the PCA Main Event in 2011 and a WSOP bracelet in 2018, was a winning part of two separate teams.
The 2026 contest drew a record-breaking 18,718 entries, generating a $18,718,000 prize pool from the rake-free $1,000 buy-in. The fast-growing contest offered up a $15 million guarantee, up from $10 million last year and just $1 million when the contest debuted during COVID in 2020.
Somerville wins share of $3.7M
Somerville, once a pioneer of the poker streaming world, has spent less time around the game over the years as other interests, like sports betting, take up more of his time. He scored big as part of the poker-heavy JUICY KEWCHI squad, led by fellow poker player Gabe Patgorski, who also runs a website dedicated to following the contest. They needed the Minnesota Vikings to beat the Green Bay Packers, an easy feat at a final score of 16-3 with the Packers already locked into their playoff position.
"I mostly feel relieved because there's so much pressure going into the final week," Somerville told the Last Men Standing podcast moments after the Vikings sweat. "Are we really going to walk away with nothing?"
Elsewhere, the Diener-led REAL BRO team featured Graham and other players from their poker circle in Austin, Texas. Diener’s team closed out the season with a sweat-free Jacksonville Jaguars victory against the Tennessee Titans. Graham gave most of the credit on social media to Diener as chief strategist, especially after a savvy Chicago Bears pick during Thanksgiving week that wiped out a large chunk of the field. The one team eliminated this weekend lost on a heartbreaker when the Cincinnati Bengals gave it away in the closing moments against the Cleveland Browns.
Too many entries?
Meanwhile, the domination of poker players in the final results triggered a spring of warm debate, which kicked off after Phil Hellmuth lauded Hall’s double win on X.
The discourse has bubbled up around Hall's self-reported 50 entries, far more than the stated limit of 10. Hall was able to spread his risk a lot further by buying stakes in other teams.
“Would be great if the official rules prohibited this in the future,” responded Todd Witteles, host of PokerFraudAlert Radio.
But the entry limit only applies to those in your name, so you could theoretically buy a stake in as many entries as you’d like and it would be well within the rules. The issue also presents opportunities to work with other teams near the end to maximize expected value, which is also allowed. It may not benefit the smaller player, but it's how the contest works. Circa likely sees no downside to the arrangement with the contest growing at a rapid pace every year.
“If there are 18k entries total and you have “1 or 2” you are also almost drawing dead,” ‘ODB’ Baker argued on X.
The issue comes down to the way the rules were written, but the spirit of the contest seems intact. If you want to play for big prize pools, you may need a big bankroll.
