Tournaments for actual dough?

Just an idea I had, as an additional way for OGS to generate revenue and maybe generate more interest in go. Would it be feasible to have tournaments with a small entry fee that awards the winner say, 80% of the pot? Naturally, there would have to be rank restrictions on the tournament. I guess preventing sandbaggers from ruining it could potentially be prohibitively difficult. Just a thought. Also, it might put OGS into the online gambling arena, which isn’t fair since go is a perfect information game, but I am not sure if the laws differentiate on those grounds.

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I suspect that would bring more problems that it would bring revenue. Of the (western) sites I’m familiar with, FICGS does probably the closest thing to what you propose. Look to their terms of servise, compare to those of OGS. And FICGS is under French jurisdiction. Under US jurisdiction things would probably be… more interesting, if possible at all. :slight_smile:

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Maybe there are more ways to generate revenue.

I can only think of spectator gambling, but I’ve heard Tygem does something similar, and I don’t quite know the specifics of it though.

We’ve definitely thought of tournaments with entry fees and payouts, we think that would probably be a good idea. I can say with certainty that we will never allow gambling on the site as this is not allowed in many parts of the US and we have no interest in going to prison.

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Yes, always good to stay on the right side of the legality line! But I am heartened to hear that you guys are considering this. Sandbagging will probably require tricky handling, unless you want to just do completely open tournaments, which I imagine would just get dominated by amateurs from China and Korea, and Japan, which is not necessarily a bad thing I suppose.

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I believe the betting system on tygem is a sort of ‘no payout’ system where players can buy in points and spend them on things within tygem (avatar upgrades and such) but cannot be withdrawn for cash again. Not certain because I haven’t looked in to it too much, but that appears to be the case from what I can tell.

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