Football Pool Picks Resources and Contests

Pools are the most-played and least-covered football game there is. Survivor, pick’em, confidence, and margin pools all reward a different skill than fantasy: you’re not always picking the best team, but rather, you’re picking the team the rest of your pool won’t. These are the tools, contests, and shows that make that possible.

Looking for a place to run your own pool? Hosting platforms are listed on Fantasy Games, Sportsbooks, Pools & Prediction Markets.

Survivor Pool Tools

The whole game is win probability weighted against pick popularity. These show you both.

  • PoolGenius Survivor Picks — The most complete survivor product available. Recommendations are customized to your pool’s exact size, rules, and the teams each of your entries has already burned, driven by simulations of millions of contests. Includes a Season Planner, Optimal Paths, an EV calculator, forecasted pick popularity, and multi-entry survival modeling. PoolGenius also has products for Pick’em, Circa Survivor, and other sports. Paid
  • SurvivorGrid — The free reference grid: win odds and public pick percentages for every team, every week. Free
  • RotoWire Survivor Grid — Interactive grid ranking all 32 teams across all 18 weeks by win probability and EV, with a pool-size setting that re-weights the math. Freemium
  • RotoBaller Survivor Tool — Free season planner: click your way through the grid, save unlimited entries, sort by Vegas odds. Free
  • The Power Rank — Ed Feng’s survivor and bracket analytics. Freemium

Pick’em & Confidence Pools

  • PoolGenius Football Pick’em — The same simulation engine pointed at pick’em and confidence pools, with picks weighted for your pool’s scoring system and prize structure rather than just picking favorites. Paid
  • Pickwatch — Tracks every national expert’s straight-up and against-the-spread picks and grades them for accuracy, plus fan consensus percentages updating in real time. The single best free read on where the crowd is going. Freemium
  • TeamRankings — Predictive team ratings and matchup projections; the data engine behind PoolGenius, and useful on its own. Freemium
  • SportsLine — CBS’s projection model; survivor, pick’em, and against-the-spread picks. Paid
  • Football Locks — Against-the-spread and pool picks alongside odds; a long-runner. Free

The Circa Contests

Circa Sports in Las Vegas runs the largest football contests in the world, with no rake — every dollar of entry fees goes back to the players. Signup must happen in person in Nevada, and picks must be submitted from inside the state, which is why an entire proxy industry exists around them. Registration typically opens in late May and closes on the Saturday of Week 1.

The Contests Themselves

  • Circa Survivor — $1,000 per entry, up to 10 entries per person, $20 million guaranteed to the last entry standing. Twenty legs in 2026: Weeks 1–18 plus a Thanksgiving leg and a Christmas leg. You need 20 of the 32 NFL teams to get through — and there are not 20 good NFL teams, which is the whole puzzle. Contest
  • Circa Grandissimo — The same survivor format at $100,000 per entry, capped at two entries per person. Small field, enormous stakes. Contest
  • Circa Millions — Five NFL picks against the spread every week, $1,000 entry, $6 million guaranteed, with quarterly bonuses and a booby prize for last place. Contest
  • Westgate SuperContest — The original Vegas handicapping contest, running since 2000. Five NFL picks against the spread weekly. Contest

Circa Survivor Research

  • CircaSurvivor.com — An independent information hub (not affiliated with Circa) covering rules, pick deadlines, and the holiday-leg quirks. Circa publishes every entry’s picks publicly, and this is one of the easier places to follow along. Free
  • PoolGenius Circa Survivor Data Grid — A Circa-specific product separate from their general survivor tool: current-week and future-week projections built for a 20-leg contest with a known field size. Paid
  • VSiN Survivor Coverage — Publishes an annual blueprint mapping all 20 Circa legs before the season, including the trap that six of the eight Christmas teams also play on the Thanksgiving slate. Free
  • @CircaSports — Circa posts contest pick distributions and eliminations each week. Free

Proxy Services

If you live outside Nevada, a proxy registers you in person and submits your picks from inside the state each week. Circa’s rules permit this, but Circa does not endorse specific proxies — vet them yourself, check what happens if a pick is missed, and understand the fee structure before you commit.

  • Winners Circle Proxy — Covers Circa Survivor, Millions, Grandissimo, and the Westgate contests; runs a verification pass to catch unsubmitted entries. Fee
  • Your Las Vegas Proxy — Circa contests plus Golden Nugget and Westgate, with a per-contest breakdown of fees and deadlines. Fee
  • Vegas Football Proxy — Handles in-person registration at Circa; heavy on pick reminders. Fee
  • FootballContest.com — Long-running proxy covering the major Vegas contests. Fee

Podcasts & YouTube

Survivor is badly underserved by audio and video, which makes the handful of shows that do it well disproportionately valuable.

  • PoolGenius YouTube — Jason Lisk runs a weekly Circa Survivor strategy show covering optimal paths, pivots when your first choice is unavailable, and Grandissimo field updates. Free
  • Last Men Standing — The only weekly podcast devoted entirely to survivor pools. Tony Farmer and Jason Anik break down Circa Survivor live every Wednesday evening, working through pick popularity, future-week planning, and who’s left in the field. Also on Spotify and Apple, with an open Discord attached. Free
  • Sports Gambling Podcast — Broadcasts live from Circa’s signup weekend each August and does a full season-mapping survivor episode. Free

Supporting Data & Models

Raw win probabilities you can plug into your own pool strategy.

  • nfelo — Elo-based game predictions and power ratings. Freemium
  • ESPN FPI — Football Power Index game predictions and win probabilities. Free
  • Inpredictable — Win probability and pick analytics. Free
  • SumerSports — Game projections and team analytics. Free
  • DRatings — Model-based game probabilities. Free
  • Massey Ratings — Composite ratings with game predictions. Free
  • Sagarin Ratings — The classic computer ratings, still published. Free
  • Pro Football Reference — Historical results and schedules for planning future weeks. Free
  • NFL Weather — Wind and conditions by game; matters more in December survivor legs than people expect. Free

Big-Money Public Contests

  • Splash Sports — Large public survivor and pick’em contests with online entry where permitted, alongside private pool hosting. Freemium
  • Circa Sports — The biggest prize pools anywhere, with the Nevada entry requirement described above. Contest

Community

  • r/survivorpool — Weekly pick threads and pool strategy debate. Free
  • Last Men Standing Discord — Open server tied to the podcast; the most active survivor-specific chat we’ve found. Invite link is posted on their channel. Free

Pool Money Management

  • LeagueSafe — Collects entry fees and holds them in escrow so the commissioner isn’t the bank. Freemium

A note on pools and the law. Rules for entry-fee pools vary by state, and some contests are limited to specific jurisdictions. Check your own before you buy in. Contest entry fees, prize guarantees, and deadlines change every year — the figures above were accurate in August 2026, but always confirm on the operator’s own page before entering.

If it stops being fun, help is free and confidential: the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET (also 1-800-522-4700), or visit the National Council on Problem Gambling.

I plan to update this directory through the season. Missing a site that deserves to be here? Tell me.

Note: Some of this compilation was assisted by Claude AI.

Last reviewed: August 2026.