Sportsbooks Win Big and Survivor Pools Get Crushed in NFL Week 2
Recreational sports bettors ruled the day in Week 1 of the NFL season, but the pendulum swung hard the other way in Week 2. A slate of upsets and low-scoring games created a nightmare afternoon for many recreational bettors. For players in survivor pools, it was even worse.
Circa Survivor lost 8,300 entries during the week - around half of the field. The biggest hits came from just three teams: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (23-19 loss to the Cleveland Browns) cost 6,061 entries, the Los Angeles Chargers (26-14 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders) took out 1,357 entries, and the Baltimore Ravens (24-17 loss to the New Orleans Saints) finished off 835 entries. Those three teams took care of half of the field chasing a prize pool in excess of $25 million dollars.
The most popular selection of the week, the San Francisco 49ers, got the job done. Roughly 40% of the field was on the Niners, who comfortably handled the Miami Dolphins, 35-13.
The carnage reached to the upper limits too. Circa's Grandissimo content, a $100,000 entry fee with, saw 19 of the 49 entries entering Week 2 seeing their dreams of a $7.7 million prize pool end. Fourteen were on Tampa Bay, four on Baltimore, and one on Los Angeles.
The sportsbook side
The survivor numbers are easy to quantify. Sportsbook profitability is more complicated, and we won't know those figures for a while yet.
But the recipe for a big Sunday for the best sports betting sites had all the ingredients: outright losses by popular favorites, lower-scoring games and failures in popular player-prop and same-game-parlay combinations.
BetMGM specifically noted that the Minnesota Vikings 9-3 victory over the Chicago Bears was one of their best games of the week after looking at straight bets, totals, player props, and SGPs.
A full Sunday of upsets doesn't necessarily mean that there was a record hold, but the contrast to the opening week of action is clear. The Bears posted 59 points in their opener and just 3 points last week. For receational bettors, building parlays around touchdown scorers, overs, and favorite moneyline wins, that type of game is exactly what the sportsbook wants.
Prediction markets hot start
The start of the NFL season has been a boom for the emerging world of prediction market apps. According to numbers provided by Aldrin Research, an estimated $24.5 billion dollars was traded between Sept. 9 and Sept. 18.
And that number wasn't spread very far. Approximately 90% of that figure was traded on just two of the best prediction market apps.
Kalshi reportedly handled $19.5 billion of that total figure, or about 79.5% of the market. Polymarket US accounted for $2.6 billion, about 10.7%. That means the field of competitors split a little under 10% of the remaining market.
Those numbers are even tighter for the first weekend of NFL action, with Kalshi garnering $4.89 billion of the $5.83 billion handled. The majority of that figure consisted of combination contracts, where outcomes are bundled together, similar to parlay-style bets we see on the best sports betting sites.
