00:06 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
welcome to circles off episode number 63, brad marchand that's it easy one it's the very the common one. 

00:15 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Yeah, good, good, good call you got. You searched that up before. Can I beat? 

00:18 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
no, no, no I, I didn't, I actually didn't. That's so so common that it's like immediately recognizable 63. 

00:25 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
No, I don't have anything else right now. I got nothing other than Marchand. 

00:31 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Famous athlete 63. Gene Upshaw. Okay well, gene Upshaw, he's been passed away now for a long time. I literally don't know who. That is Okay, I do. Offensive line for the Raiders Hall of Famer. Other 63's Mostly hockey players? Who else? 

00:49 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Mike Ribeiro, oh, mike Ribs Nice. 

00:52 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Mike Ribs. Who else that's active? Anthony Duclair, okay. Charlie Coyle. Tyler Ennis. 

00:59 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Oh, that's a lot, that's a good amount of players. 

01:01 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Also a lot of forgettable players in there. Yeah, mike Ribeiro, though, absolute legend when he was in the league. Lots, a good amount of players also a lot of forgettable players in there. Yeah, mike roberto, though absolute legend was when he was in the league I think we off me and you both, uh often throw around the term legend or legendary a little too freely no, no, we don't. 

01:18 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
We don't because here's the thing, a legend is only like it's whatever, whatever you think it is, if he did one single thing, ribeiro, which I think he did, which was he scored with no glove on, and at that point I was like that guy's a legend. So you, just, you just did one thing you had a legendary moment. 

01:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Legendary moment and that makes you a legend exactly, at least in some point. 

01:40 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
All right, what do we got for today? I'm wearing a new hat we're going to talk about. 

01:44 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
We're going to have Derek Stevens on. He's the CEO of Circa in Las Vegas. Nevada also owns the D and Golden Gate Vegas properties. 

01:54 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Property mogul, casino mogul. We'll get into that a bit later. 

01:57 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yes, we're going to talk a little bit about the Circa Millions and the Circa Survivor, which are some pretty big contests that are being run with some guaranteed money, and a little bit about strategy for that as well. I think we should probably revisit last week's podcast a little bit as well. Um, from a number standpoint, for us was very highly received, was one of our top podcasts of all time. Uh, I'm thinking in like the first week, probably only comparable to the one we did with captain jack and on the youtube on youtube yeah right, yeah, that was just youtube. 

02:33
Uh, and then the super bowl props, one which was a, a big bomb banger of an episode for sure. 

02:37 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
I mean a lot of people, I'm sure, as you can tell, because you're listening or watching on that format, but we do get a significant more amount of listeners versus actual youtube subscribers just being a regular podcast. So if you don't, if you don't watch and you only listen, let us know why yeah, let us know. 

02:53 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I would like to know that. But also, if you don't, if you don't watch and you only listen, I would still like you to go to youtube and subscribe to the channel anyways, and click the thumbs up button on whatever video, Absolutely obliterate that like and subscribe button. It's so hard. 

03:11
It's so actually. It's actually so hard for me to work that in. I don't know why it feels like it feels like I'm I'm asking for like the world whenever I do that. But I watch a ton of YouTube. I watch a ton of YouTube and everyone does it so seamlessly, where I don't even notice. I have to find a way to just like slip it in there. 

03:29 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Yeah, all those YouTubers like what's up. Everyone Like and subscribe. Smash that like button. We'll be back every Monday, wednesday, thursday and Saturday. They just have like-. 

03:40 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
They have, like the bell on the screen gets lit up and like pops up and whatever it's listen I. 

03:45 - Zack Phillips (Other)
I slipped it into our. I have a different channel as well. I slipped it into there by promising a mullet at a certain number of subscribers. Plug your channel here. Uh, it's leafs digest on youtube, just just a straight leafs show breaking down trades, rumors, reactions, all that kind of stuff and post game reactions. But I promised mullets and we followed through and I've had it for like four or five months now. Yeah, he likes it. 

04:12 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
For whoever we're at, like what? 875? Something like that. Followers Yep, I'm throwing it out there. Whoever our 1,000th follower is, you can't see that? Well, you're right, we can't. We can't see that we don't know who the south thousand is, so we're gonna actually have to pay someone. Yeah, we don't even know. We'd have no way of knowing that so I can't do a I can't do a bet. 

04:33 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Stamp studio hat giveaway no, this we, we could do a giveaway. We'll do a giveaway at a thousand youtube subs, but we can't give it to like the thousand sub. No, can't see that. You not going to be able to see that. What can we do instead? 

04:47 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Guys, the year is 2022, and you're telling me we can't figure out who. 

04:52 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
No, YouTube knows it. They're not going to give that info. 

04:55 - Zack Phillips (Other)
No, because you can have private subscribers so they don't publicize it, and then you can't see. Well, that's very disappointing, in my opinion well, we can give something else out, like uh, we'll wax both of luke's likes if somebody could. 

05:08 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
If someone, okay. How about this at a thousand? We do a giveaway where people could submit their screenshot just to prove that they're subscribed, and then of those people we pick and give something away. Okay, maybe a signed football helmet player to be named literally, could be anybody. Oh, a mystery helmet. 

05:28 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
We might do that other people get paid in memorabilia, you can too. 

05:31 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Yeah, exactly, exactly we might give away a some rookie cards, all right, so anyways, about the episode. Yeah, I guess well received. Um, I guess did you want to share the update on, like the communication we had with simon, directly or yeah, I will say like before we recorded that episode. 

05:47 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
For anyone who thought um, like it was unfair, I get it. Obviously we did, you know, put up a thumbnail of simon hunter's face with the word exposed next to him like I. I understand where people are coming from, don't get me wrong. We did reach out to both sim Hunter and Chad Millman the day before we recorded the podcast to see if they were interested in coming on. Did not get responses. I'm not going to wait like a week to do content that is current. We did the episode without getting the responses. 

06:20
Since then Simon has responded to our producer, zach. At first he said he was game to come on the podcast and talk anything related to nfl, once getting more details about what we're all about. He did not want to do the podcast. Fair enough, I understand, but just so people know, we did reach out um to get their commentary and we decided to do it in the way that we did because it's a long piece of audio. I think it was just like very suitable to doing it in the format that we did, where we played it and reacted in real time rather than just coming on and talking about it for half an hour or 45 minutes and people not understanding the context. 

07:02 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
I personally think we will do more of those types of episodes is that it was actually pretty fun to record and like go over in real time. So definitely do that. Um, and that is kind of like somewhat. You know you could actually watch that at any time. I know it's not, you know that was a couple weeks back in terms of what it was, but you know, if we're a year down the road, uh, you could still fire that up and have a good laugh. So if, if you haven't seen it now, go back, check it out. 

07:26
Basically, as Rob mentioned what we did, we went through a video that appeared on another video podcast and a lot of the stuff that was being said wasn't necessarily, you know, up to the current standards of where, like a professional sports better would have been. There's a lot of misinformation, so we basically just debunked it. You know standard breakdown video, the truth behind what that could have meant, what it potentially didn't mean, and you know we call it. You know Simon Hunter exposed fake professional sports better gets exposed. Yeah, that's basically what it is it was. It was not even clickbait. 

07:56 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, so I just want to add like, For me, I don't mind. I don't mind all any type of sports betting content. I really don't. We've talked about this before on this podcast. Probably been a long time since we did this conversation. Everyone who consumes content is going to value different things. One person that I really enjoy in the betting space is Book it With Trent. I find his content to be hilarious, especially the small TikTok stuff that he does. He does not represent himself as a winning bettor. In fact, he does quite the opposite Talks about how much he loses, makes fun of himself when he loses. He still does some sort of daily stream where he's picking games, posts them to his Twitter account account and people follow his bets knowing that he's a winning loser, so it's not a losing better. 

08:54 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Now, technically he does. He does lose bets, but he is a winner, he's a lives the nice following and his content is hilarious. I second that. 

09:00 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
But he, he's very I don't, I don't like he doesn't misrepresent himself, comes out, says this is what it is, you know if you want to, but he's grown a community and there's like a community aspect to betting. I fully understand that as somebody who was in group chats for years with all my friends of like what are you betting tonight? Like people want to bet together, want to be on the same sides. They want to win together, lose together. I think there's a real element of that. 

09:26
Where I have an issue with betting content is when people misrepresent themselves. If someone comes out and says I am a professional sports better, I make my livelihood betting on sports and that's why you should listen to me and tail these picks and you don't actually do that, I have a problem with that. That personally bugs me. I'm very animated about it, as people can obviously tell, but that's where I have an issue. So I thought it was completely fair what we did last week, because I don't think it's fair for someone to do weekly content and say they're a professional sports better. We could have brought up so much more. I'll even bring it up now. I don't care. Simon Hunter tracks his bets on the Action Network, if someone wants to look up how those are doing, you're going to see a pretty big red figure. Okay, at least there's an element of transparency. But then don't come across and say you're a professional sports. 

10:25 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Don't, don't go download the action network app. You don't even need that, it's, it's it's sub part of SM. Just take, just take Rob's word that he's a, that he lost money in betting, or just watch the episode. It'll be very clear to you anyways. Yes, so okay. 

10:45 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So getting potato? Sorry, were you gonna say anything else? No, no, that's it. I, I, we, we can stop there, but for I do listen. I don't want to. I'm. 

10:48
I'm very much a bunch of pessimists by nature. Obviously anyone who's known me for a long time knows that. Um, they know I'm generally a negative person. There's a hashtag negative rob for a while, or positive rob, I should say, when I was trying to be positive, that didn't last for too long. So I I do obviously take the negative side of things a lot. 

11:10
I do appreciate everyone who did reach out and talk about how much they enjoyed that podcast and how it was refreshing and they need more of it, especially those who did not put down Simon in the process as well. I'm not here for personal attacks we don't have to, you know, make any, take personal shots at people or whatever but I do think that there's a need for that type of stuff. Um, and if I could go back, I'd completely do it again and thank you for all the people who've listened, downloaded whatever, watched on YouTube. Um, I do appreciate that, and there was a lot more positivity than negativity, but I did want to answer for those people who were like yeah, you know why would you do something like that. Or you know he's not misrepresenting himself, so on and so forth. On to the next. 

11:48 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Okay, so on to the good stuff for this week's episode. We had done a previous episode. We talked a little bit about some football contest strategy behind them. What we're going to do today is see my new hat on Circa Sports. 

11:59
As Rob mentioned, we do have Derek Stephens joining the podcast in a bit, but what we did want to do was actually break down two amazing contests that Circa Sports has this year. It may seem like a little bit of a plug, but what we actually are trying to do here is promote these contests because we do think that they're amazing value for a lot of bettors, and I can get into the reasons why. We'll get into what they are and then we can talk some strategy. So, off the rip, I'm going to go into kind of what these are. So two contests for this football season. The first is called the circa millions contest. All right, what you do in this contest is you pick five games a week against a locked spread set, so there's no moving lines. When the line moves, you don't get to re-bet or anything like that Static. 

12:44
Static, as people would call it. So lines will come out on a certain day. You'll be able to bet those and lock in sorry your five picks and then at the end of the week your record is your record. You get added to the leaderboard. This contest is guaranteeing $6 million in prizes and a guarantee of at least one million to the person who wins it. So at the end of the football season, if you're the lead in that contest, you're getting guaranteed one million dollars. If you're, you know there's definitely. 

13:13
There's a ton of other prizes that go out. There's like quarterly bonuses, last place stuff like that which we can get into. But the good thing about the contest and why we actually do want to promote this as one of the best contests in potentially in North America right now, is Derek as we're going to get into later in the interview we're going to ask him about it has guaranteed a $6 million prize pool. What that means is it's a thousand dollar entry. So if only 10 people enter, obviously you know it's going to be more than 10 people. 

13:40
There's more than that entered right now, obviously but if only 10 people were to enter this whole contest, right then you'd have 10 people times a thousand dollars, you'd have 10 grand in prize money that derrick has collected for circa. He's still paying out six million out of pocket. So what that means is, until we hit that equilibrium point, which we're nowhere close to right now, you are getting significant value on this contest. This is also known as an overlay, but the kicker here is is an absolute free roll for the player, because if you know, if 2000 people sign up, you're at a significant overlay, so you'd be at $2 million. So if 5,000 people sign up, you're at 5 million. They're guaranteeing out 6 million. You get a million dollar overlay right there. However, if 10,000 people sign up so now we're at $10 million collected by Circa the prize pool is no longer 6 million. The prize pool now goes to 10 million, right? So all in, you are at the lowest possible. Like your lowest expected value on here is neutral is you put in $1,000 and your entry on day one is worth $1,000. The best case scenario is we only fill half the pool for the better, for the betters, and then now your entry is worth two X unexpected value. 

14:51
So with this contest. It's an awesome opportunity, but also this is not something where, like you know, a book is taking a vague. This is an opportunity to play zero rake and with relatively 100% security and guarantee that the money is actually going to get paid to you. Obviously, people do pools with buddies and stuff like that. A lot of people try to get big pools pay out cash. For the most part everything works out. But you know there's been cases and there's been times around where you know people don't necessarily get paid out for the pool. So you might win a hundred thousand or 200,000 and then not get paid out with this. Obviously it's through the regulated market in the state of Nevada. Circa's got the licenses, they've got the properties. They're paying out that money. 

15:31 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
As of now, at the time of the recording 848 total entries. Current overlays 5.152 million. Now, obviously we still have a month till football season. There will be more signups. But, to Johnny's point, if it does fill, they pay out more than what the guaranteed amount is, so they're not taking anything. It's a zero VIG. No house rake on this Should point out it's going to sound I don't want this to sound like I'm better than everyone else, because I'm certainly not. I've never cashed in a football contest, in a Vegas football contest. I'll make that abundantly clear. However, there's going to be a lot of dead money in these contests, as there are every year, because, for one, people forget to put in picks happens every single year. If you're someone who's not going to forget to put in picks, that already puts you at an advantage, because there will be people every single week who forget to put in picks or they can't get a hold of them, and and when you forget to put in your pick it counts as a zero Zero for the week. 

16:25 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
There's no auto pick nothing, you just get nothing. 

16:27 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Correct. 

16:27 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
So if you forget one week, you're basically, for all intents and purposes, you're out of the money. 

16:32 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Second of all, you're going to have a lot of smart bettors in there, but you're also going can get a lot of lottery ticket people in there that actually are not winning NFL bettors. 

16:51
Then, on top of that, you will get winning bettors who might not understand any sort of the game theory that comes with entering a football contest. Um, for example, true story, but I competed in football contests where I put real money down in Vegas to be part of a contest with other friends who also did the same thing and after at a certain point, they were competing against one another to see who could do better rather than who could actually make money. Like this is going to happen Legitimately happens in friend groups where they end up with side bets of who could beat one another. They completely lose the game theory of the actual contest itself because now they're only trying to beat their friend and that creates an added advantage as well. Those are small, I mean, it's not. I'm not saying every single person is going to do that, but it is a contest with a very hard, very large prize pool where there's there's worse places to put money down. 

17:40 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
So I'll get into a few specifics in terms of the actual contest, just so everyone's clear on, like, how it kind of works. So the entry fee is one thousand dollars, one thousand US dollars. One caveat, and why there's so few entries right now, based on a lot of regulations. You know, within the states and within the area surrounding Nevada and the state of Nevada, you have to register in person for the contest. So what that means is you cannot sign up unless you physically go to Las Vegas, go to Circa Sports Resort, go to the counter and pay money. You don't have to pay cash, you can pay credit card, room whatever, but you need to actually physically go to Circa. So because of that, anyone who is going to Vegas or planning to take a trip out before the football season potentially a good time Obviously it's a thousand dollar entry. Maybe you want to split it with a buddy, maybe you want to do something else, maybe you want to get multiple entries. The maximum amount of entries for this contest per person, per name, is three, so you will not be able to get more than that. Again, ensuring that there's a high chance at an overlay here on the Circa Millions contest In terms of actually putting in your picks. 

18:49
Another slightly difficult thing which, again to Rob's point, this is why a lot of people do forget to put in their picks. You cannot put in your picks unless you are physically located in the state of Nevada. Okay, it is legal within the contest. To the best of my knowledge, it is fully legal to contract or hire a proxy service. Or if you have a buddy in nevada, family member in nevada who is there, they can log into your account with your password and put the pics on from their phone, but there is a geo location guard that ensures that they are in the state of nevada. So if you live in pennsylvania or ontario or canada, you cannot put the picks in. There are plenty of services that do this for you and if anyone needs help with this, you feel free to DM Circles Off and we'll make sure we can guide you in the best we can. Obviously, no guarantees. A lot of times with some of these services you might run into issues, but we can potentially hope to connect you with some reputable people that from our past experiences we've used and nothing has gone has gone wrong in that sense. So you can use a proxy service to get those picks in, but you physically need to be located in Nevada to put the picks in. 

19:59
So if I were to recap real quick you go to Vegas, you sign up, you leave Vegas, you go back home. Every week you text a guy, he puts your picks in, he sends you the confirmed screenshot. You're good to go. At the end you win the contest. You go back to Vegas, spend half the money in Vegas and then come back home with half of your winnings. Hopefully you win the million dollars and you're scot-free. So that is the uh kind of the way it works and the way you need to put your picks in. We're we're going. Right now I'm discussing the circa millions contest. It's a pick five contest within nevada. Any additional things to add, rob, before we get into the strategy? 

20:34 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
no, that's all clear. I mean, I think there is some sort of strategy around picking your proxy if you are from out of state, um, or out of country or whatever. Uh, there's tons of proxy services available. Like you said, you can just get a friend in Nevada contact in Nevada to do it for you as well. But because of the timing of when your weekly selections have to be submitted in any sort of pool where there's a static line, you're best to wait to as close to the deadline as possible because you can get as much of the information as possible. This is another mistake, like it's one of the most common mistakes. Right, for the circa millions, your picks can be submitted up to 4 pm on each Saturday, provided it's not the yeah, it's the millions up to each Saturday 4 pm. 

21:22
What tends to happen? A lot of people are like I'm going to be busy Saturday morning, submit my picks on Friday night to my proxy, get my. You lose access to the information that comes in on Saturday. So there are proxy services that obviously don't want to miss the deadline for you. Make sure that you give them enough time, but waiting until as close to last minute as possible to submit picks, finding a proxy that can do that there's a ton of them that can do that as well is very advantageous for you relative to the rest of the field, especially in the day and age we live in now. How many times last year would you get breaking news on a saturday about a bunch of people being out with covid? And then you're like, ah, submitted all my picks already. Guess what? Once you submit your picks, once you read the rules of these contests, you can't change them. So there's a, there's a lot of strategy that comes yeah easy there. 

22:11 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
You don't want to be submitting your picks on wednesday or thursday because so much can change. You know aaron rogers could go down, uh, you know, with the, with the flu or covid or with an injury or something like that. And then now all of a sudden you're you're stuck with a terrible line where you got packers minus 10. The true line is is a pick them. So you always want to wait till as long as possible. Make sure you don't miss the deadline. I'd say the number one strategy here is do not miss a deadline on your picks before that deadline, you're done. 

22:35 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Number one always starts with this. Always we're going to talk about some stuff here, but 100% need to read and understand the rules of the contest. So many people do not understand the rules until it's too late. There's stuff that you can take advantage of over the course of a week, like if a game deviates from its originally scheduled time, what happens? So all of a sudden, you have a covid situation over the course of the week. You need to know what's going to happen if you pick that game, because guess what, if it's not that week, you get a zero for that game. If it changes location, though, it plays and gets rewarded. So now, if you know that the away team is going to be the home team, the line's going to flip, whatever, so, on and so forth, you can use that to your advantage. So know the rules, plain and simple. It's tedious, but it takes less than 10 minutes to read the entire rules for this contest. Read it three times, understand it and you can develop some sort of strategy. 

23:32 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Do you want to go over the payout structure right now, because that helps a lot as well. One thing people don't really know about this contest like it does award a last place prize, right, so you're never out of it. You go 0-5 the first two weeks. Many people be like I'm done, no, no, you're, you're still well in. I think it's a quarter million dollars for last, is it? 

23:48 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
it is, uh, 100k for dead last okay. And 50k for second last, and I believe there are also quarterly prizes for last place as well, okay. And people might say, oh, it's completely random, you can't actually pick to. You know, you can't, because this is a static line spool. It's very easy for you to take negative propositions and intentionally try to lose just as much as if you were playing to win. And if you're playing to win and there's a static line that comes out that's Cowboys minus three. But because of a bunch of injury situations, the Cowboys are now minus seven, minus seven and a half You're going to take the minus three as one of your five selections to win. If you're playing to lose, you're going to take the other side plus three, because you have so much negative closing line value. So you're going to want to adjust your strategy depending on where you are in the standings at all time. This is any contest whatsoever, and maybe it's not week two, maybe that's an exaggeration, yeah. 

24:44 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Midwayway through the season you're going to evaluate. Like you're going to be able to see right now, like I cannot, I can probably not money in this contest, yep, um, but I might have a shot at last. Uh, there's also, as rob mentioned, quarterly prizes, right. So what you have to do there is make sure you're keeping an eye on the schedule when are those quarterly prizes paying out and then manually tracking how people are doing in that quarter so that you can see if you're in the lead for that quarter or if you are, let's say, one game back and the person who is ahead of you is constantly taking the chalk picks and the ones where the lines have moved, then maybe that might be an opportunity for you to actually take a negative ev bet in that scenario, given that that you, you are very certain, or you know, likely, you think it's likely that he, the guy ahead of you, might have the positive ev pick. 

25:33
If you take a negative ev pick now, you're actually positive ev in the in the long run, because what you're doing is giving yourself additional variance versus him. Or, if that game wins, which is negative ev in an isolated bet now, you might leapfrog him and get that quarterly prize, you know, get that quarter million or get something like that. So there's a lot of things that people don't necessarily take a look at in this contest, where, if you're just submitting your five picks, based on whoever you like, every week, the amount of expected value you have is diminishing week over week. If you are in the contest reading the rules, going through and actually trying to get an advantage week over week, now you are actually in a spot where forget about the overlay, forget about the no vig you're probably already, like you know, you've got a significant expected value. We're talking like between 1.5 and 2x on your investment. 

26:26 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Your goal is to win money, plain and simple. People are entering this to win money. You're not entering it to achieve the best record that you can that's not going to cash or to beat your friends, or so on and so forth. So you're always going to be changing your game plan based off of positions. Like Johnny said, there's quarterly prizes that might dictate what you do in week four of the season, or week eight of the season, or week 12 or whatever. That can have an impact. Your, your standing is going to have an impact on what you do late in the year. If you're chasing the money, you're out of the money. You're going to want to differentiate yourself from other people. Maybe you're going to start wanting to pick a Thursday game here and there, even though that means submitting picks earlier. No one picks Thursday games, so that's a good opportunity to differentiate. So what? 

27:06
What makes this an interesting contest for me is not just the okay, yeah, like. Obviously you want to pick things you're confident in. I'm not. I'm not suggesting that you just, you know, pick random stuff every week. You want to handicap the NFL. Everybody wants to do that. I completely get it. But there's going to be scenarios where you're going to change your style and try to do things that quote, unquote essentially outsmart or differentiate you from someone else that could possibly have a lasting impact. So that's very interesting. They also have the Circa Survivor, which to me also presents a huge opportunity for some game theory, because there are some differentiators from just what a regular Survivor pool is. 

27:46 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Awesome, so I can go through this one as well. The second contest is the Circa Survivor. This is a contest where it's a standard survivor pool. For those who don't know what it is, real quick. You pick one team each week, straight up, no spread, and what happens is, if that team wins, you advance, survive. If that team loses, you are eliminated. No buybacks, no second chances, the caveat being you cannot pick the same team more than once. So if you pick the patriots in week one, they're x'd out. Now you can never pick them again for the duration of the contest. 

28:15
The way the contest works is whoever survives the longest or gets through all of the 20 weeks will win. I said 20 weeks and not 18, despite the fact that there's 18 in the NFL season, because this circa survivor contest is a slight bit differentiated. You have to pick one game on the Thanksgiving day, which is, you know, there's three games to choose from. It's on Thursday at the end of November, as it is every year, and you also have to pick one game from the Christmas weekend slate, which typically does feature some Saturday games. So again, need to read the rules there and pick an additional game. So, with that being said, it's 20 in total. Since there's 20 in total, obviously it's an extra two versus regular survivor pools. There's not too too many people that are surviving. You have to take, obviously, 20 of the 32 teams in the nfl to make it through, which is obviously very difficult because, as we know, there's a lot of absolute garbage teams in the nfl that will only win a few games and you might have to rely on some of those in any given scenarios. 

29:19
Last added caveat here is uh, so there's a six million million prize pool guaranteed for the Survivor Contest. This $6 million does not work the same way the Circa Millions Contest works. With the Pick 5 Circa Millions Contest, there is a specified amount of prizes for different things. You have a prize for quarterly, prize for last, prize for this, prize for first, prize for second. All the way in the top 100 will cash. With the Circa Survivor Contest, one person can, in theory, win the six mil. So if you are the only one who survives the 20 weeks, you win the contest. Bam, six mil USD right in your bank account. You get one of those big fat checks. You're there taking the picture and it's a really cool thing. 

30:02
So the last thing I wanted to mention with this contest in terms of an additional rule is they have added an additional stipulation. As of last year, same rule applies for this year. If you do not take either of the two teams that were just previously in the Super Bowl, this year it would obviously be the Rams and the Bengals. So if you do not take the Rams and the Bengals and still make it through the 20 and win the contest, you get an additional million dollars. That comes straight out of Derek Stevens' pocket and we're going to have him on in a bit to discuss that. But 6 million is guaranteed and that doesn't even include the additional million you can get from not taking those two teams. So I will kick it off to Rob for any strategy behind it. The rules are the exact same in terms of registration and in terms of the proxy service. I won't go over that again. 

30:49 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So, just to make it explicitly clear, the additional 1 million could get divided up amongst winners. So it's not a million to everybody, it's a million divided up. So if we go back to last year, there was five winners of the Circa Survivor. Two of them won it with picking the bucks and chiefs who are the previous super bowl teams. Three of them won it without using and they divide. They each split a million, so they all won. 

31:15 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
So 333 for those people who did not select the, the chiefs or the bucks, and then the six million. Actually last year I believe it was 4 million. Uh was split amongst the five, so so everyone took a nice chunk of change home. 

31:30 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
There's two additional pieces of complexity, which johnny has mentioned, that make this different from a regular survivor pool. One is that you are going to have to plan for two weeks of the season that only have three games, because you have your three thanksgiving day games. You have your three christmas, early christmas, you know standalone games as well, which are all close games. By the way I looked at it this year, it's like tampa bay at arizona, green bay at miami and, I think, a denver someone else. 

32:00 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
That's like they're gonna be close, yeah, but you, you never know, because we always I always do this and I look at the beginning of the year and then next thing you know, like an injury happens or one of those teams is just absolute garbage. Like last year it was, I believe the Falcons were playing on Thanksgiving and like, coming into the year, the Falcons were like thought of as like a decent team. Yeah, they had a shot to potentially be good. And then it was very evident on thanksgiving like oh okay, these guys are actually like not good at all right. 

32:25 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So I mean that that's what's part of your strategy this year is do you intentionally hold off on team like we? We have look ahead lines for every game this year. We know what these spreads would be for thanksgiving now and christmas now. On look ahead lines, the ones for the christmas one are like no, I'm not going to save any of those teams because I could potentially pick any of those teams on that day. It could be a coin flip. Who knows, maybe Aaron Rodgers gets injured Now, all of a sudden, miami's a big favorite against Green Bay. I can pick Miami. But do you do something different on Thanksgiving, knowing that there's potentially one lopsided matchup or so on and so forth? That adds an element of complexity to it. 

33:01
I'm not an advocate of ever saving teams. I've talked, we've talked about this on episode 29. If someone wants to get like a full one hour long football strategy discussion episode 29, for sure, give it a listen of circles off. But you gotta, you gotta win to like. Your goal is to win every single week. Technically, your goal is to maximize expected value over the course of the year. 

33:24
But if you're saving teams and taking worse options at the beginning of the year, you're potentially impacting your ability to get to that point. 

33:32
Plus, like Johnny mentioned, okay, yeah, I want to save the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to later in the year and the Buffalo Bills so I can use them later in the year. What happens when Josh Allen gets injured or Tom Brady gets injured? Now I'm potentially not going to use them and I never had a chance to use them because I've limited myself in the early going. So you have that element of it. Then you have the element of do I or don't I take the Rams or the Bengals at some point, like what happens if you come to a week, hypothetically speaking, where the Rams are a 10 point favorite and there's no other team on the board that's more than a four point favorite. Are you going to forego using the rams that week because of the fact that you're costing yourself a potential extra million dollar payday if you win, or are you just going to let it ride on a smaller favorite? So we start to get into more interesting decisions on a weekly basis than just a standard survivor pool, of course. 

34:29 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Of course, I'll mention this now before I forget it. If you've taken all the six teams that are playing on thanksgiving, you've already used all six of those. You are just automatically out correct, so you do have. 

34:38 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
There is an element of planning regardless yeah, you have to plan. 

34:41 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
You can't just take whatever team for that week. You have to somewhat plan, uh. But yes, I agree with rob. Like you know, I'm not the biggest proponent in saving teams, because you just never know what could happen later in the year with injuries, um, or just general general team declines or improvements. One another example we've mentioned on the previous podcast is like that that week 18, um, in this contest would be the final week of the contest, like selection number 20. 

35:04
If you're saving the bills, like, and they're, they've clinched the division, like Josh Allen, he's not going to play the game. So now, like the bills, that would have been, you know, the minus 14 and a half versus the Jets. They might be like minus four and a half versus the Jets, or maybe even a dog, depending on how many players are resting. And you just wasted, essentially, you know, one of the super bowl favorites because you wanted to save them for the last week and you may not even get that out of it. So, element of planning, for sure, game theory, for sure, you, obviously, with these contests, you want to take a look and see what percentages, uh, of the teams are available for the most, for the, the majority of the pool, so you always want to you. If you're going to take kansas city one week, uh, you want, you're going to check. Does 100% of the pool have Kansas City left? If that is the case, then it's highly likely that Kansas City is going to be a well-picked team this week. So we have to make sure all that stuff happens. 

35:56
I personally try to never pick an underdog. If I ever do have to pick an underdog, that's very, very bad planning that went into it on my end. You should never have to pick an underdog. There's a lot of you know, risk, high risk, high variance moves that you can do and take a two-point favorite, a three-point favorite. You shouldn't have to take like a five-point dog ever and you shouldn't have to ever take a money line underdog I don't I don't want to use the word never mathematically. 

36:21 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
There could be a reason where you, you might, that might be the best move, but if you've gotten yourself into that position, you've probably done something wrong along the way. One new rule this year which is interesting is so you can do up to six entries in the circus survivor. If you pick the thursday night football game, week one, which is rams bills close to a pick-em line right now, and your team loses, you can enter additional, up to six additional entries in the week one. So you could potentially go a route where you back the thursday game. 

36:59
I wish it was a different thursday game this year yeah, it would have been better if there's like a 10 point favorite that would like if last year I think, the bucks were seven point favorites over dallas, maybe six on opening night on the thursday, which like that probably would have been what they scraped by narrowly they won by a field goal. But that would have been like a great example of like, okay, fuck it, I'm gonna ride all six entries on the bucks. 

37:21 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
If they lose, I'm buying in another six entries this week yeah, I did that for, uh man, I don't even know what year this was, probably three or four years ago. The patriots I had loaded up all my entries on them for thursday night football they lost against the chiefs no yeah, kareem hunt's first game. 

37:35 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think so I remember that clearly I lost an entry that night. 

37:38 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Yeah, so I lost a bunch of entries and the theory there was like I can see how many people were actually in on the Patriots and, depending on the percentage of the pool, I already know that money's gone, so it's sunk costs. Like you know, I might be plus EV now buying in, given that the pool guide out in the pats as well, so you can go back, buy back into a pool that has like somewhat of an overlay now. If that's the case, absolutely 100. 

38:01 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Always read the rules, cannot stress it enough. You will find stuff that you can use to your advantage and then just be adaptable is all I would say as well. On top of that, um, you do have a lot of information at your advantage or at your disposal, even if you don't realize it like, even if you don't realize it, like even if you don't realize it, if you're talking about circa millions, you know what everybody picks on a weekly basis. Those get released. You can see what other people's tendencies are. If you're chasing people, like Johnny said, you can see if they're picking off stale lines, if they have preferences towards certain teams. Yes, it requires work, but there's data available for you to use. 

38:36 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
So these are really interesting contests, and now we're going to bring in oh, hold up, hold up, before we go into that interview, we did have a couple of questions that were submitted. We were able to. We're going to be asking Derek a few of these, but there's some that you know I don't think we're going to waste his time with, so we can answer them here. One of them them easy one can I participate if I live in canada? The answer is yes, um, so again, with the caveat being you do have to actually physically travel to nevada and go to circa and walk inside to the counter to actually to actually do it, but yes, you can from canada. One other thing is um, obviously, talk to your accountant if possible. There could be some potential advantages to signing up from canada, given that, um, you know, the the tax on lottery, lotto and stuff like that in canada is different structure than the united states. So, talk to an accountant as well. You may be able to qualify for some like tax back or something like that. If you do cash, um, you know, obviously, rob, as he mentioned, has never cashed in one of these, so he, his accountants completely did not get a call, but maybe this year, um, secondary, uh, okay. So he said uh, for the millions. Someone said for the millions bonus prize, do multiple people split the 1 million if they go 20? You know we just answered that actually. So, yes, um, we asked a few of these to derek. 

39:51
And then last one here just um, why is it legal to submit out-of-state picks with a complete stranger or proxy in Vegas, but you can't just submit them directly to the sportsbook? How is adding an extra layer of complexity with an unknown person make it legal? It doesn't make any sense. So whoever sent that in? You are absolutely right. I don't know why. This obviously stems back to a lot of the regulations in place within Nevada, so the lawmakers have made that it's been in place for a while. There's a lot of other things within Nevada given that it was one of the first states to allow regulated gaming that are slightly outdated and were put in place to stop have a lot of countermeasures back in the day. 

40:35
I'm just speaking from what people have told me, what I've heard on other podcasts, stuff like that. Obviously, I am not a lawyer, so I'm not sure the exact specifics, but you know. Another one, for example, is the technology you're able to use and, like you know, you aren't able to build certain things in certain ways, because they have to be built in towards a certain thing or by a certain company, or go through a certain act. So I think, all in, we hope one day that it gets to a spot where this contest can be run and you can sign up online, and we might have guys like Derek you know, if we're going to, if we're going to get bigger maybe he guarantees a hundred million one day because of the fact that we're able to run this contest all across, you know, the United States and Canada. So maybe one day as of right now, though, you were absolutely right. No idea why, but without further ado, we're going to jump to the interview here. 

41:21 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
We now welcome in a very special guest here on Circles Off. He's the owner of D Las Vegas, the owner and CEO of Circa Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, which I've had the privilege of going to several times you recently as well. Johnny Derek Stevens now joins us on circles off. Derrick, how are things going? 

41:39 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
uh, terrific, great to talk to you guys yeah, great to talk to you as well. 

41:44 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Uh, let's start with circa right out of the gate, because I think it's it's pretty fascinating. Um, I'm a frequenter to vegas obviously not in recent years. We've had the, the pandemic, and so on and so forth, so it's been a little bit tougher. I hadn't't been to downtown Las Vegas in a long time. I go to downtown Vegas. First thing I notice is that there is this spot that stands out from the rest now, which is circa pretty incredible building. You walk in I actually walked in the front doors, spoke to someone. I'm like hey, can you direct me to the sports book? They're like you see the TVs over there which I could see from a mile away. It's a pretty incredible spot. So I just wanted to know how that vision came about. Like, was this always some sort of dream that you had? Was it something that came up very abruptly? You've obviously been involved in the hotel space in a long time in Vegas, but talk to us a little bit about that vision for Circa and how it all came about. 

42:38 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Detroit, have a business out of the Detroit area and still do, but I decided to buy a small casino in in Vegas in 2006. It was called the Golden Gate. It's actually on Fremont Street and it's right across from where Circa is located today. And my thought was, well, we're going to get into the casino business. So let's see what happens. If it worked out. My brother and I, we wanted to uh, continue to grow and if it didn't, well, we would have just walked back to detroit with our tail between our legs, I guess. Um, but things worked out pretty well and we were able to kind of parlay the golden gate into purchasing a property, another property on fremont street called uh, fitzgerald's. Uh, we renovated that um, all 34 stories, and we converted that into the D Las Vegas, and that was 2011,. 2012 timeframe. 

43:25
By that point in time, we were we were pretty committed. You know we love Vegas and we love we love downtown Vegas. So when there was an opportunity to buy a property called the Vegas club, we went after it and we were able to get it. Initially, we weren't sure if we were going to renovate the Vegas Club or demolish it, and one thing led to the next and we were able to do nine separate real estate transactions on the city block that Circa sits on right now, and when we were able to acquire the entire city block, that's when a little bit of the scope and design started developing in our mind as far as what we could do here. So we had an opportunity to build something from scratch and allowed us to bring all the new modern amenities into something. 

44:14
Yet at the same point, I wanted to kind of respect and revere a little bit of the Vegas history and the downtown Vegas history. And well, a little bit of that is kind of what went into the circuit, you know, specifically about what we wanted to bring in. I knew that we wanted to bring in some big, you know, destination elements. Fremont Street's really all about attractions and we felt, you know, we could bring a handful of attractions in the property. 

44:43
Like, for example, we took the sign Vegas Vicky that was hanging out on the Glitter Gulch for four decades. We brought that sign and rehabbed the sign and brought Vegas Vicky inside. We created the Legacy Club, which is our rooftop club, which gives you a whole view of the entire valley, and then we brought in a couple of really big things. I mean the world's largest sports book, and then we brought in, you know, the world's largest outdoor sports watching venue and stadium swim. So it all kind of came together and really we kind of designed stuff that uh, that, um, you know, places that we wanted to hang out at, places we wanted to be, and pretty sports orientated, so that sports is a pretty big theme throughout. But uh, but, vegas, vickies and uh and uh, legacy club and the great restaurants, that all kind of adds to uh, adds to the property that's awesome. 

45:36 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
So, for anyone who hasn't been to Vegas, I will say Vegas is absolutely state-of-the-art in terms of, like, the buildings and the hotels and the infrastructure, and a lot of people invest in their casinos and there's a ton of state-of-the-art casinos. When it comes to sports books, no doubt about it, circa is the best in the game. They relaunched and opened a new one. I opened a new one. I believe it was coming on maybe two years or around there. Now, uh, we'll post some pics up on the youtube stream and then also stadium swim, which is something I had the pleasure of visiting a couple weeks back, and, uh, man, this thing is absolutely amazing in terms of actually a sports viewing event in vegas. When it's nice and hot, you can get in the pool, grab some drinks, fire some bets and again, we'll post a and tag a picture there. 

46:17
Derek, one quick question for you, and this is more just. I just want to know this so you invested in, obviously, the golden gate, um, and you had that in in Vegas. But what I want to know is this where did that come from? Like first off, how'd you get the money from that for that? Were you just working, and was that always the plan Like did you just take a shot and you're like, all right, I'm going to come from Detroit and see if I can become this big casino guy. Or you know what was the plan. 

46:43 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Well, yeah, I mean, coming from Detroit, my brother and I bought into the Golden Gate. We bought 50% of it and you know, enough time has gone by. We're privately held, but I can tell you. I mean mean we spent seven and a half billion dollars to buy in and then, uh, we kind of took it from there. 

47:00 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
um so, where's that seven and a half mil come from? Were you working other deals in detroit? Were you doing casino stuff there? What did that just come from? You know where? Where's the initial like how did you eventually start there? Because a lot of people obviously making the first million is a lot harder right Than subsequent. 

47:17 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, I'm the CEO of a manufacturing company out of Detroit, an automotive supplier, and you know I'd been CEO by that point for 12 years. So my brother and I we put our funds together to buy that initial stake in the Golden Gate, but I'd been working for a while before that. Like I said, I was CEO of this manufacturing company for over a decade all right, so auto manufacturing parlayed. 

47:43 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
That was like, all right, I'm gonna take a risk, get a casino. And then now obviously you're listening to derek, uh owns many properties within vegas and none, uh, bigger and better than circa. So let's get into that, because that's why we're here today. One, one thing that Circa does that's really unique at this point, especially because the Westgate, I believe, is ceasing their operations of their super contest is two competitions that are, you know, almost all across the US and Canada right now, but are centralized in Vegas. One is called the Circa Millions and the other is called the Circa Survivor. So, derek, we'll let you kind of explain what those are and why you guys wanted to launch those contests. 

48:20 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, we wanted to launch both those contests our first year, but we were only able to launch the Circa Millions and that's because the software wasn't written for a Survivor contest. So it took us a year to write the software. But Circa Millions took off. The first year we guaranteed a million and a half dollars in payouts it was a thousand dollar entry fee and and we made it. The next year we pushed it to $3 million guarantee and we made it. Last year we pushed it to 4 million and we made it. 

48:51
And this year we're getting a little aggressive. We're we're we're guaranteeing $6 million in the Circus Sports Million. So we're pretty excited about this year. I mean, the way it works out is $6 million in overall payouts. $1.2 million of that is going to be guaranteed in quarters, so we split up the contest into four quarters, so it's $300,000 we're guaranteeing each quarter and then all the rest goes in the overall. So we pay out the top 100 in the overall. And the way it works is you just pick five games each each sunday against, uh, against the point, against the point spread. So 18 weeks times five picks, uh, it's 90 selections and, uh, the one individual who has the best record does, guaranteed a million dollar payout and then, like I said, we pay down to the, down to the top 100 in the contest. 

49:44 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Yeah, we've. So we've just gone over earlier in the episode on some strategy as well as kind of like a breakdown on the contest. What we also want to know before we get into some listener questions, derek, is what is in it for for Circa. I know it's a lot of promo, but you're guaranteeing six million bucks out of pocket, and we mentioned kind of like the overlays and potential there. Like, are you guys, do you guys think there will be an overlay this year? Are you hoping to get past that six million? Where does it currently stand right now? 

50:11 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Well, let me answer the second question. First, we absolutely are hoping to get over the six million because if we don't hit that 6 million it's coming out of our pocket. So we're really hoping we get over the 6 million. We wanted to grow the contest every year. What we do, that's kind of unique, is that we don't take any rake Every dollar that goes in. You know, if we don't hit the $6 million worth of entries, you know we're guaranteed. If we go over 6 million in entries, every extra dollar that goes into the, goes into the contest, is being returned to all the players. So there's no rake, so that that lends the to the. 

50:45
To your first question, like why do we do this? Well, you know the. The one thing that's pretty cool about is you have to. You have to show up in vegas to register and, um, you could play from anywhere. You play from play from Canada, mexico, any state in the United States. You know, one of the winners last year actually lived in Dubai. 

51:05
The reason we do it is because we want people to come out and see our, our new resort. We want them to come out and check it out and I figure well, if I can get 6,000 entries out here. I bet you a few people are going to walk into this place for the first time and say, oh my God, I love this. Next time I come to Vegas I'm staying at Circa. Or maybe when they come in to register, maybe they're going to stop in at a restaurant or maybe they're going to run into a crap game or something like that. So really our whole gaffe on the whole thing is we just want people to come in and check out our new resort what I find really interesting about the contest in particular. 

51:41 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I've gone through all the rules myself but also as part of the payouts, you guys award a last place prize. You award a second to last place prize and we're not talking about peanuts here, we're talking about 100k to someone who finishes last place, which I think incentivizes someone who might be having a bad run earlier on in the year to potentially pivot at some point and say hey, you know what, there's money on the line here If I can get some bad picks in or find a way to be at the bottom by submitting picks on a weekly basis. I'm just curious, derek, as to how that came about. I mean, there's some cool stuff in here, the blue jacket, like how did these ideas come about? Is that specifically from you? Is there a team that's going over the contest rules every year saying what can we do to make this a little bit more interesting? 

52:21 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, it's our team. It's our team that really comes up with it. So, jeff Benson, mike, paul, matt Metcalf, myself, we usually sit down and we just kind of come up with something. Yeah, the Blue Jacket just evolved as we wanted to give a prize to the winner that was more than just, uh, more than just a million dollars, but something, uh, something physical that they could own for the rest of their life. Uh, so that's kind of how the blue jacket came about. 

52:45
Um, you know the, uh, the, the last place prize, um, which we call the booby prize. Uh, you know, it's just as difficult to go 30 and 60 as it is to go 60 and 30. You know, last year the fellow that won the booby prize matched up in his record against the individual that won it all. And you know it was pretty amazing. Amazing to follow. You know on Twitter and then on on social and what we do on decent, pretty amazing to follow. You know the winners last, the, the, the, you know the top guys in the last four or five weeks, and then also following the guy that was in last place. I mean, he was a hell of a fade. So it was. It was a lot of fun to do that and, like I said, it's just as difficult to go 30 and 60 as it does as it is to go 60 and 30. 

53:33 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Very interesting. You're right. I believe last year's winner won at a clip of 70% over the course of the season. I think it was exactly 70%. He won by tiebreak as well. Going 30% over the course of the season is pretty challenging to do, but still, nonetheless, hitting at 30% is a tough thing to do over the course of the year. Let's talk a little bit about the Circus Survivor as well. Obviously, you mentioned that didn't get off the ground the first year picked up. Now I've noticed, I think, what are some more interesting rules that differentiate itself from a typical Survivor pool, that someone may be running locally or whatever, which includes the added two weeks for Thanksgiving and Christmas and also the bonus prize for not picking the Super Bowl contestants from last year, which were the Rams and the Bengals. So talk to us a little bit about the Circus Survivor Contest what we're expecting there this year, what the prize pool looks like. 

54:30 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, so we're guaranteeing $6 million in Circus Survivor. Our first year of Circus of circuit survivor, we had 35 uh individuals that went undefeated. Uh, last year we made it a little bit more difficult because we added, uh, you know, the christmas week, so you got 18 regular weekends, but then we had thanksgiving and christmas, so there's a total of 20 selections if you can make it all the way through this season. And, um, if you, if you make it to the end, um, that six million dollar prize pool could go to one person. It could get chopped. If that, like it was last year, five people made it, so there was five, uh, five contestants that uh chopped the six million. And then, you know, yeah, we added a little bit of fun in there and, um, the way it works, this year we're're adding a million-dollar bonus If someone makes it through the season and goes undefeated and never takes the two teams in last year's Super Bowl. 

55:28
So they never take the Rams and never take the Bengals. And the reason we did that is because it throws in a little more game strategy and game theory on. Am I going to take the Rams on one game just to survive to the next week, or am I going to pass, you know. So it kind of mixes things up. You know I love seeing these survivors on a given Sunday, where maybe there's 10 or 12 teams selected. 

55:56
You know everybody's trying to get to the uh, get to the end. But uh, you know, when you look at a schedule, there's a lot, a lot of pathways to get there. I mean, you know, like one of the things I don't know if you guys can see this too well, but but you know I'm walking around now with my schedule. I got my whole schedule here and you know you start over here and there's a lot of ways to get over to the promised land over here. So so, uh, yeah, just adds a lot, a lot of strategy to uh, to how you get there yeah, that that's awesome, uh, okay, so we only have you for a couple more minutes. 

56:27 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
We had a lot of listener questions that were submitted, um, so a lot of them we can answer on our own, but there's a couple that we'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts on. Number one, given that, um, you know, we live here in ontario and canada, just outside of toronto, is there any plans for a circuit to expand uh into the canadian market? 

56:46 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
yeah, I would love to. I mean I'm I'm excited about seeing that. Um, you know, there's there's real sports buddy now coming ontario. Um, I'm very familiar with ontario myself. Uh, you know, I guess in particular I spent my 19th and 20th year in Ontario, going over the bridge or through the tunnel almost every weekend. But you know, my dad went to the University of Toronto, so I had a lot of family in Toronto so I'd be going up you know the 405, you know pretty regularly and everything like that. So I would tell you that we would love to get into Ontario at some point. We have to make sure we've got our tech stack put together appropriately, but, but I would say at some point, not in the short term, but but Ontario is definitely a jurisdiction we would be very interested in. 

57:33 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
Good stuff, good stuff. We had. We had two people or ask actually a few different people, asked two separate questions here in terms of potential new contests. So obviously you know a lot of stuff is coming in now like the player props, uh, different fantasy, daily fantasy style stuff. Um, do you ever see kind of any, uh any, new contests that might come throughout the next couple years? So one example could be somewhere where you actually pick against the active circle line, right, so the line that's currently being traded by the guys you know, chris Bennett and the guys in the room, or potentially something with daily fantasy where we can go national there. Any thoughts on those? 

58:09 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Yeah, it's really two, two separate questions. I would love to do a tournament that is that involves live lines. It would be a different style tournament than the traditional football contest or the Survivor that we're doing. But that's something that's probably in the back of our mind. But it also comes down to really developing the right software and how it would work and how it would work. So, developing software in these areas, that's probably the biggest hiccup that we can have. So I can certainly tell you it would not be in the next football season. Just getting to the ability to get the software corrected. It's at least a couple-year project. But I would love to do something where you can have tournaments that you can go off live lines, because then that can expand to other style tournaments. It could expand to two-week baseball tournaments, it can expand to two-week hockey tournaments and, uh, that's something I would like. I would love that it could expand to, you know, weekend hockey tournaments, that type of thing. So, uh, I, that's something that's certainly in in our the back of our minds and and, and that could happen. 

59:20
Fantasy football Now that's a whole different ballgame, and the reason I say it's a different ballgame is because fantasy rules are different in every jurisdiction. It's pretty difficult to develop a program where in certain jurisdictions, certain wagers are available and certain wagers aren't. For example, in Nevada there's a number of wagers that are not allowed, like just more of the entertainment style. Like, for example, in Nevada you cannot bet on the Oscars, you cannot bet on who's going to win, whether Joey Chestnut's going to do anything in the hot dog eating competition. Yet in Colorado you can, new Jersey, you know's. So everybody has different jurisdictional elements. So, um, when it comes down to fantasy football, as an example, um, like in the state of Iowa, you cannot have a negative proposition and and the definition of a negative proposition is um evolving. But you can't have a proposition saying will X quarterback throw more than two and a half interceptions, which is which is construed as a negative player prop. So so there's a lot of complexity that gets involved when you're talking about about the fantasy component and real wagering. 

01:00:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Derek, before we let you go, I just wanted to get your a little bit more information on the upcoming contest weekends that are being run in Vegas. I think there's three weekends in August where people can come up to Circa, sign up for the millions, sign up for the Circa Survivor as well, and we do have a lot of quote unquote heavy hitters who listen to this show as well, who are probably going to be maxing out um their their entries, whether that's the three in the serve, uh the millions and the six in the survivor. Um what additional perks or incentives could they get for the full max entries? 

01:01:07 - Johnny Capo  (Co-host)
yeah, if they tell you they're coming from circles off podcast, what are you going to do for the guys? 

01:01:12 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
well, there you go. Anybody, anybody that wants to come out and sign up for the full house, which is a full house of six survivors and three millions entries. Just get a hold of Jeff Benson on Twitter, get a hold of me, or Mike Palm, and anybody that's signed up to a Full House, we'll give you a hotel room over at the D. We're doing events for three separate sign-up weekends. First sign-up weekend is a bit of a canadian weekend where, uh, where we're doing an event at a meet and greet with a handful of vsan celebrities at at our bar at the d called bar canada. And then on saturday, we've got a complimentary day where we're renting out a big chunk of stadium swim, and then, uh, saturday night, we've got a canadian band theory of a dead man. So we've, we've got, uh, we've got that all as part of that, that opening weekend. 

01:02:02
The following weekend, we've got the cocktail party, stadium swim, and we've got simple plan, plan, so part of that contest. And on the last weekend, we've got a cocktail party in bar Canada, again a stadium swim. And then we're doing a mike palms uh, 2022, uh, football contest preview and he's got a handful, a handful of people to come in to answer questions. They're going to do a kind of like a panel setting in our in our new uh, in our new ballroom here at circa, and they've he's got a handful of people that are coming in from uh, former uh, super Bowl winning quarterback and V-City host, sean King, mike Palm, chicago Bears legend, brian Urlacher, julian Edlow, from the sports betting space, so we've got a lot going on all three weekends. 

01:02:51
So we'd love to have everybody out here for the sign-up weekend. Well, we'd also love to have people out here to come out to do your draft, uh, nfl, uh, nfl. Fantasy drafts are pretty big business for us at circ and at the d. I think we'll probably do a few hundred um draft parties. Here we have all all types of different ballrooms, meeting spaces and suites and and uh and groups coming out to do their fantasy football drafts is a pretty big, pretty big deal for us. Us. 

01:03:17 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, for sure I can like, I can imagine. I'm not a big fantasy football guy myself anymore, but I was enamored with it for years. I can only imagine what doing a draft in Vegas would be like with the buddies. That's gotta be like a weekend to remember. So I would encourage people to check that out. I personally will be in Vegas for the weekend of the 26th 27 the weekend of the 26th 27th, doing my full house uh round of signups as well, looking forward to meeting you in person as well. Derek and um, all the best with running the contest this year. Hopefully we can get you no overlay. Hopefully we can promote this well enough. It's a great contest, um, and enough that I'm likely, like I said, where I'm willing, to max out entries myself for the chance at winning a huge guaranteed prize which you just don't get elsewhere. So it's a one of a kind. All the best, derek. Thanks for joining us. 

01:04:01 - Derek Stevens, Circa CEO (Guest)
Hey, thanks. I look forward to having a couple of beers with you at Bar Canada over at the D on the weekend you're out here. This will be great, perfect, thank you.