NFL Week 1 Vegas contest picks: Top Survivor, spread selections from Las Vegas contest expert

NFL football has arrived once again. The 2025 season is underway, but the equally exciting and seemingly just as massive football contest season is upon us as well.

I started playing the Las Vegas Hilton SuperContest around 25 years ago. I have always played in a team format and never as just an individual. I played on a handful of different versions of teams for nearly a decade before winning it all with a team of four in 2011. Our team name was "Sans Souci," which is French for "No Problem" or, technically, "Without Worry." That was the very last edition of "The Hilton Contest," as it was known for so many years by local Las Vegans. What we have today is the Westgate SuperContest, and we also have a new player in the game, Circa Sports, who has a contest nearly identical to the SuperContest, Circa Million.

Unlike the incredibly popular Circa Survivor, Circa Million and the Westgate SuperContest require five picks against the spread for every week of the regular season. Oftentimes, there are differences in the lines between the two contests because the SuperContest puts its contest card out on Wednesday evenings and Circa releases theirs on Thursday mornings. The deadline to submit picks for both is on Saturdays, 4 p.m. Pacific time for Circa and 5 p.m. Pacific for Westgate.

It appears that Circa Million 2025 will approach, if not exceed, 6,000 entries at an entry fee of $1,000 each. SuperContest will probably touch somewhere in the neighborhood of 750-800 entries at $1,500 each.

That is well over $7 million in contest prize money, and we haven't even included the Survivor contests at each property, the SuperBook's new College Football contest, or Circa's newest addition to the menu, Grandissimo, which is a Survivor contest that comes with a $100K entry fee attached.

The appetite for football contests continues to grow exponentially. It was last season that 2015 SuperContest champion James Salinas, nine-year NFL veteran Mike Pritchard and I came up with the idea to host a show about the football contests in Las Vegas. We host the Las Vegas Football Contest Show (www.FootballContestShow.com) for 21 weeks. We have three entries in Circa Survivor and single entries in both the SuperContest and Circa Million. We record this show on Friday mornings, and it is typically available by 4 p.m. Pacific. We break down all of the games from both a betting and contest perspective and eventually release all of our contest plays.

Here at SportsLine, I'll be sharing my top recommendations for all of the contests and my thoughts behind the picks. 

So which team should you back in Week 1 for Survivor? And which teams have strong value on the spread?... Join SportsLine right now to see who you should back in Week 1, all from Las Vegas contest expert Brady Kannon!