Why Holiday Underdogs Can Win You Circa Survivor
Every 2025 Circa Survivor winner picked an underdog on Thanksgiving. Here's the math behind why that wasn't as crazy as it sounds — and how to spot when it might happen again.
by Jason Lisk - May 24, 2026
Caleb Williams is +EV to frustrate his coach. (Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire)
Thanksgiving and Christmas present unique strategic opportunities in Circa — if you know how to read the market.
Picking an underdog on Thanksgiving in a survivor pool feels wrong. You’ve made it this far — survived double-digit weeks against a field of thousands. It’s been an emotional grind, and the numbers have dropped dramatically. In some years, an entry still alive at Thanksgiving might have 20x or 50x in implied value compared to the entry fee.
Putting your life on the line on a team now expected to lose feels bad. Why take that risk now, on a short holiday slate, with a team that might win only 30% of the time?
And yet, in 2025, every single Circa Survivor winner did exactly that.
In a year that we may never see repeated any time soon, the underdogs went a perfect 4-0 on Thanksgiving weekend. Baltimore, one of the most popular picks entering the holiday, lost on Thanksgiving night. Then Philadelphia — picked by over half the remaining entries — fell to Chicago on Friday. Chicago had been picked by just 3% of the field.
Even though it was an extreme year, in terms of the sheer number of upsets, seeing the Thanksgiving popular pick go down isn’t a rare event.
Those that put their entries on the line on an underdog were not just lucky. It was math. And the players who understood it were positioned for it.
Why This Comes Up — And What Our Tools Show
In Circa Survivor, surviving the season requires making roughly 20 consecutive correct picks. The path you take through those 20 weeks matters enormously — which teams you use, when you use them, and how your choices compare to what the rest of the field is doing.
Our Optimal Path tool takes your specific entry — your past picks, the teams you still have available — and identifies two things: the path most likely to keep you alive through the end of the season, and the path most likely to maximize the value of your entry if you win. We call these the Max Survival path and the Max EV path.
Most weeks, they point in similar directions. But on holiday weeks, they can diverge sharply, to the point that one goal might point toward one team, and the other to its opponent — and understanding why is the key to one of the most counterintuitive edges in Circa Survivor.
Why EV Can Favor An Underdog on Holidays
In normal weeks, underdogs rarely appear in Max EV paths. Popular favorites tend to be picked by around 30% of the field, and the math usually favors going with the better team.
Holiday weeks are different. With only a few games on the slate, pick concentration becomes extreme. The most popular Thanksgiving team has averaged over 54% of all picks across the first six years of Circa Survivor. That level of concentration does something important: it dramatically lowers the EV of the favorite while raising the EV of their opponent, even when that opponent has win odds well under 50%.
Here’s the core mechanic: if a team is picked by 54% of the pool and they lose, over half your competition is eliminated in a single game. That’s an enormous equity swing — and it accrues entirely to the people who went elsewhere. The underdog doesn’t need to be likely to win. They just need to win often enough to make that equity swing worth chasing.
Max Survival will still point to the favorite — because the favorite is more likely to win, full stop. Max EV may point to the underdog — because winning with the underdog is worth so much more. Further, because the teams that are holiday favorites also tend to be teams with high value across several weeks in the contest, being able to use a lower value team at high leverage can be a good holistic move, from a contest EV perspective, even if other individual favorites have a higher EV for that week.
Neither path is automatically correct for every entry. But understanding why they diverge is what separates strategic players from ones just following their gut.
Six Years of Thanksgiving Data
| YEAR | TEAM | PICKS | PERCENT | SPREAD | WIN ODDS | EV | RESULT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | PHI | 489 | 54.3% | -7 | 76.9% | 0.93 | L |
| 2025 | BAL | 269 | 29.9% | -8 | 78.4% | 1.11 | L |
| 2025 | KC | 78 | 8.7% | -3.5 | 64.3% | 1.07 | L |
| 2025 | CHI | 28 | 3.1% | 7 | 23.1% | 0.99 | W |
| 2025 | DET | 13 | 1.4% | -3 | 61.4% | 1.15 | L |
| 2025 | CIN | 10 | 1.1% | 8 | 21.6% | 0.81 | W |
| 2025 | DAL | 8 | 0.9% | 3.5 | 35.7% | 0.84 | W |
| 2025 | GB | 3 | 0.3% | 3 | 38.6% | 0.77 | W |
| 2024 | KC | 29 | 53.7% | -13.5 | 87.1% | 1.01 | W |
| 2024 | DET | 17 | 31.5% | -10 | 80.6% | 1.00 | W |
| 2024 | DAL | 5 | 9.3% | -4 | 67.0% | 0.95 | W |
| 2024 | GB | 3 | 5.6% | -3.5 | 63.3% | 0.94 | W |
| 2024 | MIA | 0 | 0.0% | 3.5 | 36.7% | 0.70 | L |
| 2024 | NYG | 0 | 0.0% | 4 | 33.0% | 0.68 | L |
| 2024 | CHI | 0 | 0.0% | 10 | 19.4% | 0.61 | L |
| 2024 | LV | 0 | 0.0% | 13.5 | 12.9% | 0.59 | L |
| 2023 | DET | 216 | 58.2% | -8.5 | 78.9% | 0.89 | L |
| 2023 | DAL | 94 | 25.3% | -13 | 86.7% | 1.22 | W |
| 2023 | MIA | 32 | 8.6% | -9.5 | 80.0% | 1.23 | W |
| 2023 | GB | 12 | 3.2% | 8.5 | 21.1% | 0.73 | W |
| 2023 | SF | 11 | 3.0% | -7 | 74.2% | 1.18 | W |
| 2023 | NYJ | 5 | 1.3% | 9.5 | 20.0% | 0.39 | L |
| 2023 | SEA | 1 | 0.3% | 7 | 25.8% | 0.45 | L |
| 2023 | WAS | 0 | 0.0% | 13 | 13.3% | 0.40 | L |
| 2022 | BUF | 41 | 58.6% | -9.5 | 79.0% | 0.91 | W |
| 2022 | DAL | 21 | 30.0% | -10 | 79.9% | 1.14 | W |
| 2022 | MIN | 5 | 7.1% | -2.5 | 56.3% | 1.10 | W |
| 2022 | NE | 3 | 4.3% | 2.5 | 43.7% | 1.05 | L |
| 2022 | NYG | 0 | 0.0% | 10 | 20.1% | 0.84 | L |
| 2022 | DET | 0 | 0.0% | 9.5 | 21.0% | 1.05 | L |
| 2021 | DAL | 80 | 59.7% | -7 | 74.1% | 0.91 | L |
| 2021 | CHI | 21 | 15.7% | -2.5 | 55.1% | 1.04 | W |
| 2021 | BUF | 15 | 11.2% | -7 | 73.2% | 1.34 | W |
| 2021 | DET | 14 | 10.4% | 2.5 | 44.9% | 1.01 | L |
| 2021 | LV | 4 | 3.0% | 7 | 25.9% | 1.13 | W |
| 2021 | NO | 0 | 0.0% | 7 | 26.8% | 0.69 | L |
| 2020 | DAL | 90 | 43.7% | -2.5 | 56.4% | 0.88 | L |
| 2020 | HOU | 76 | 36.9% | -3 | 59.9% | 0.93 | W |
| 2020 | WAS | 29 | 14.1% | 2.5 | 43.6% | 1.41 | W |
| 2020 | DET | 11 | 5.3% | 3 | 40.1% | 1.36 | L |
- From 2020–25, the most popular Thanksgiving team averaged 54.7% of all picks and a 0.92 EV.
- Their opponents averaged 4.0% picks and 0.98 EV, with three of those six underdogs posting +EV.
- The 10 most popular favorites on Thanksgiving are now 5-5 over six years.
- In six years of Circa Survivor, 12 of 124 entries that picked a Thanksgiving underdog went on to win (9.7%), versus 47 of 1,611 that picked a favorite (2.9%).
The Key: It’s All About Reading the Market
Here’s the most important thing to understand about holiday underdog strategy: the edge has nothing to do with the underdog itself. It comes entirely from how the crowd behaves.
The reason Chicago at 3% offered an EV edge opposite Philadelphia at 50%+ is because of that gap. If the field had distributed picks more evenly — or if a significant portion had also gone to Chicago — the math would have looked very different. The value is created by group pick behavior, not just by the teams themselves.
That means this strategy requires active market reading, not mechanical rule-following. The contest dynamics and high value of entries still alive by Thanksgiving will always tend to cause some to lean conservatively, but If Circa players as a group ever stop concentrating heavily on holiday favorites — if picks spread out more, or underdogs start getting picked at high rates — then favorites can become the better play. The edge flips with the market.
Similarly, if the contest pool seems to be saving one particular favorite, then saving one who is not preferred, and is being used up early, can provide value.
Watch how picks are trending as the holiday approaches. If the largest favorite is tracking toward 55%+ of the field, the underdog math gets interesting. If picks are more distributed, the calculus changes. Our tools will reflect this in real time, but understanding why helps you trust them when they tell you something that feels uncomfortable.
Christmas Week
Thanksgiving gets the most attention, but Christmas weeks can present similar dynamics — with one important caveat. In two of the five years Circa Survivor has used Christmas games separately, only four entries made it there. Last year, that number was only 10 entries left by Christmas, despite over 900 being alive for Thanksgiving.
When you make up a large percentage of the remaining field yourself, picking the underdog dramatically reduces your own EV even if you win, because you’re likely splitting with whoever else took that same path.
The underdog strategy is most viable when a large number of entries remain, so that your contrarian pick doesn’t get crowded out by others making the same call.
Strategy Takeaways
- The hesitation you feel about picking a Thanksgiving underdog is exactly why it can work. If it felt comfortable, everyone would do it, and the edge would disappear.
- Survival should usually come first. Cutting your win odds dramatically just to chase a thinner split is often too risky. But on concentrated holiday weeks, the math can and sometimes does genuinely shift.
- If your goal is maximizing prize share or chasing a solo win, holiday underdogs opposite heavy favorites are worth serious consideration.
- The best approach is to arrive at the holidays with multiple options. Don’t plan on underdogs, but recognize when they offer the best EV.
- Most importantly: read the market. The value here is entirely driven by crowd behavior. If that behavior changes, the strategy changes with it. Our Optimal Path tool updates in real time each week with past results, availability, and future projections — check it as Thanksgiving approaches.