so why to force me to gamble before or afterwards?
Thanks for the honest answer. We hear you on the withdrawal part and we're still thinking about it. 50 hands to register is about 15-20 minutes at the cash tables. The idea is simple: we want people who stay on the platform, not only come for the prize and leave. A cheaper buy-in is also coming, see below.
I definitely play fake casino in which neither you invest your money nor can you withdraw the money you win.
Thanks for the honest answer, that's a very reasonable approach. We're actually planning a platform like that: you play for chips, no real-money games and no cashing out. Poker and Durak would work the same way, only with chips. You will be able to buy chips, and we're planning to run tournaments there with real prizes, things like electronics, phones and trips. It's still early, so I won't promise details yet, but we're aiming to announce it in January 2027, and we'll post about it here.
a $10 buy in is too high for the prize pool you are offering
Fair point, we're going to lower it, probably to $3 for the first tournament. I'd rather not go to $1 or zero, because a fully free event brings people who take the prize and never come back. Also, the buy-ins don't go to us, they go to the prize pool, and the platform adds $80 on top. With 15 players that's $230 at a $10 buy-in, $125 at $3 and only $95 at $1, so the buy-in is what makes the pool bigger. We agree with an entry condition instead of a lock on prizes, that's where we're leaning, and we're ready to put in a few hundred to get started.
Wait, is this buy-in fee applied to every round?
Yes, every tournament has its own buy-in. That's why we want to make it cheaper: at $3 the whole season is about $24-30, and you don't have to play every event, the two weakest results are dropped. A one-time season entry is an interesting idea, we'll think about it. 13:00 UTC is noted, we'll see what most players prefer.
the season prize of 200 USDT for the player who finishes first in the table looks small to me
We're not a big company like the huge platforms, and we'll get there, we'll run big leagues like that too at some point. For the start, we're adding about $80 to every tournament, and we may make the final prize bigger. For us that's a serious budget, and we don't really earn anything from it, so I think it's not a bad result. We also noticed that several of you prefer 3 paid places for the season prize, we'll take that into account.
So where we're leaning: 50 hands to register as the entry condition, a $3 buy-in for the first tournaments, and $80 added by the platform to each prize pool. Two questions:
1. Does a $3 buy-in work for you?
2. Do you want bounties at all? A bounty is a bonus for every player you knock out. We wouldn't add extra money for it: bounties would be paid out of the prize pool, so the places would get a bit less. If you're interested, what bounty size would feel right, something small and reasonable, not huge? For example, with 15 players and a pool of about $125, $1 per knockout takes around $14 out of the pool, $2 takes about $28.