Pay to play at Tournament.com, win cash

When it came to FPS deathmatches on the PC, I was always on the receiving end of a severe thrashing. I quit playing when I stopped having fun playing thirty seconds or so into each match before being forced to watch my teammates finish the round.

For those of you who manage to wipe the floor with the competition, there’s a new site aimed at you. Tournament.com is a new site which will host cash tournaments on Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike: Source, fully licensed by Valve. But it’s not all free gaming for money – users are required to create an account and download their client before players can pay-to-play for a chance to win.

Currently, Tournament.com is hosting free play until the service officially goes live next month and they’re offering $500 every day to the top ten most active players in a 24 hour period; $250 in the Americas and Canada and $250 in Europe respectively; that’s $50 for each of the 10 players who likely spends far more time than I could imagine playing online. To keep the matches fair, Tournament.com have a proprietary anti-cheat system and an in-house team of dedicated anti-cheat experts.

For those who can’t help but squander their mortgage online, Tournament.com has taken steps to prevent too much financial collateral damage:

“To ensure responsible gaming, Tournament.com allows users to stake no more than $10 per match and deposit a maximum of $150 in their account each month.”

In addition to that, they offer a customer services team who will be able to offer you guidance and point you in the direction of professional support in the instance you feel the service is having a negative effect on your life. Fancy that! As of this writing, I wasn’t able to find out concrete details on how it calculates, but from what I gathered, once you deposit money into your account, you’re able to stake some on a match and if you or your team wins, you’ve won your share of the total invested cash. And for those who are as afraid as I am to sink money into what amounts to thirty seconds of mayhem before the sting of death:

“The service also provides a ranking system that allows players to view other users’ skill levels, and a handicap system to allow players of all levels to play against one another.”

All this and Clan support should make for a solid, cheat-free experience with two of the most popular FPS available.

Site [Tournament.com] Read [T3]