Well, I’m a believer that for the people who pay the money, they’re not merely paying to play, they’re also paying to see the best players. Think about it. What do tournament organizers advertise when they’re setting up a big tournament? Do they advertise the prize money? Not really, that’s an assumption, and most of the people who go are never going to see it and know that in advance. So what else is drawing people to come?
You got it. They’re coming for the show. They want to see the main event. That’s part of what they’re paying for, it’s part of the social contract that goes into tournaments. Somewhere in there, that got lost by the wayside. I never saw it happen much in the northwest. Row and Kuan had each other’s phone numbers but they never took our money and ran, they knew people were coming from all over the northwest and sometimes Canada to see a good fight and they delivered. When Drew-Dub and I carpooled out to Kennewick and took the top two spots in their tournament, we fought hard and took the grand finals to two sets, and the locals loved seeing it and didn’t feel that we cheated them by showing up to their tournament a bit, because we delivered a good show for the finals for the money we were getting for it.
In this tournament, people came around from all over northern California, and they didn’t get a finals. I don’t know if that’s a common occurence down here, but it’s really, really wrong. It breaks the honor agreement between tournament players and the people who are winning their money. We’re paying the money. Most of us don’t really expect to see it again. But we want to see you put on a show if you want to have it from us. If you don’t deliver, then you’re scamming us, in a way.
However, if you feel like this is a major imposition to actually play a finals, I’m coming up with a new idea for how to motivate you. If you still want to take the entry fees and run, go ahead. Knock yourselves out. But here’s $50 more on the table (which is not much money to me, but it’s a significant boost to the probable tournament pot) that you’ll be leaving behind by doing so. If you don’t want it, I’m not stealing it from anyone else by simply keeping it. But if you want it, those are my terms. Give us a fucking show. That’s part of what we’re here for.
How this concept evolves over time, I don’t know. Maybe we should find a way to put a part of the tourney fees in escrow, payable only upon play of a satisfactory finals, and if you don’t play it, part of your share gets refunded back to the other players who got cheated out of the show. It’ll be hard to enforce that, though, because a bunch of them might leave and it’ll be hard to find them and give their money back. So putting a bonus over the tourney pot might be a better way to do it. If someone else in the community wants to help front the cash, I won’t complain, but as I said, $50 isn’t much to me so I won’t scream bloody murder if I’m the only one putting it up. I care enough about a community I’m a part of getting a real finals instead of being scammed by people just showing up for the money and running once they’ve got it. If somebody in the tournament organization wants to come up with another way to motivate finalists to play and save me the trouble, I can work with that too, but this is my proposal for now.
$50 for a real finals, zero if you refuse to play. It’s not a bad bargain for a gamer to play for it.
