NFL Preview: Las Vegas NFL handicapping contests add excitement to Chicago Bears 2026 season.

The upcoming National Football Season is about to kick off and Chicago Bear fans are excited. This season looks like a Super Bowl year. Many Bear fans are adding to their excitement by entering fantasy football leagues. But the excitement doesn't end with fantasy leagues. Sports handicapping contests increased in popularity. No two contests are more popular than the "Circa Million" and "Circa Survivor" hosted by the Las Vegas Circa Sportsbook.

Chicago Bears fans are entering the contests. Why not? The Circa Million has a guaranteed $1,000,000 first place prize. A $1,000 entry fee gets you into the contest. All you have to do is be the contestant who accurately selects five NFL teams to cover the point spread each week. The player with the best record wins a million bucks while those finishing in the top 100 places win graduated cash prizes.

The Million contest was brilliantly created in 2019 by Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens. He read the writing on the wall correctly: sports bettors want more fun and along with bigger payoffs while handicapping National Football League games without betting the mortgage. Stevens launched the Circa Sports Million with the purpose of allowing non-professional sports bettors to copy massive high-stake Las Vegas sports wagers-without making nosebleed high wages. The $1,000 one time cost entry fee initially appears high, but it covers the entire season with a guaranteed 1,000,000 for first place.

The brilliance of Derek Stevens continued as the popularity of the Circa Sports Million led Stevens to create the Circa Sports "Survivor" Contest in 2020. The contest requires participants to select one winning team each week without using point spreads. Sounds easy until you find out the contest made the holiday weekends of Thanksgiving and Christmas as "weeks" and instead of eighteen selections, contestants have to submit twenty selections during the season. If that isn't tough enough, another rule is you can't reuse a previously selected team. If you use the Chicago Bears against the Panthers this weekend, you can't use them for the rest of the season. This contest's popularity grows every year as the 2025 season had a twenty-million dollar payoff that was divided by five participants who went 20-0. That's about a 4 million pay off per entry.

Can Illinois residents participate in a contest hosted by an out of state sports book such as the Las Vegas Circa? Yes, they can, but they'll have hire hire a "proxy service" based in Nevada. One such proxy service is Football Contest.com based in Las Vegas. Created twenty years ago by Toni Law and her partner Matty Simo, they were the first proxy service to obtain a Nevada business license. According to Toni Law, she agrees with Circa CEO Derek Stevens' statement that the contests offer the regular guy an opportunity to win a huge amount of money, "It's a thousand bucks for an opportunity to win a million or twenty million dollars". In other words, it's about 50 bucks a week for an opportunity to win life-changing money.

The thousand bucks initially sounds expensive, but sources reveal the average household in the USA wagers approximately $1,100 per year. It's very unlikely a thousand dollar bankroll will give you an opportunity to win a million bucks during an NFL season, but a thousand dollar entry in the Survivor or Million contest certainly can.

As of press time, there's over 20,000 entries in the Circa Survivor and it promises to grow until the September 12th, 2026 deadline. You don't have to enter the Circa Survivor to enjoy it. One of the most entertaining social media outlets following the Circa contest is the Circa Survivor podcast known as Last Men Standing (@LastMenPod) on YouTube. Hosted by Tony Farmer and Jason Anik, both give useful insight to strategies used in surviving the contest.

Which team will step up and win the Super Bowl? I'm betting on the Chicago Bears. Right now they're about a 20/1 Las Vegas underdog to win the Super Bowl and projected to finish third in the NFC North. Will I take them in the Survivor contest this Sunday against the Carolina Panthers? No, I need the Bears selection available later on in the season during the two additional "holiday weeks" as the Chicago Bears face the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving and the Green Bay Packers on Christmas Day.

This weekend will have Bear fans glued to their televisions. The Bears face the Carolina Panthers and many Chicago fans are worried because the Panthers could pull an upset. But, there's another contingent that's worried: Circa Survivor players who selected the Bears to win.