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Tournaments in Fight Klub are not going to function like they do in any other TCGs.

Tournaments in Fight Klub will be controlled by the players.

We want to make it possible for you to have a real, sanctioned tournament in your home, dorm, place of work, basically anywhere. This naturally means we need a system to protect against people uploading fraudulent tournaments and it means a structure where what previously happened almost exclusively in retail outlets can happen with players/Mentors (and still at retailers too), anywhere you like. We have numerous ideas about reinventing the tournament structures for trading card games. Some involve tournament support. Some do not.

In most sports, tournaments have sponsors. An entity that pays for the costs of tournaments in exchange for the advertising benefit they get for their own business. In other tournaments, chess for example, the venues are small and the events are paid for almost exclusively with entry fees and the sweat of the players. Chessboard manufacturer are nowhere to be seen. In the grassroots structure of Fight Klub, we don't expect sponsors (although it would be perfectly fine if a gang or group of players were sponsored).

TCGs evolved in a manner that the cost of tournaments were split into two primary parts: The first part was the manufacturer who simply included what you call "official tournament support" in the cost of a pack of cards. Every customer pays for it, but in most games less that 10% of customers participate. Only perhaps ½ of 1 percent of players in any TCG have ever earned prize money. The second part was Retailers who provided support (and location) by selling cards at a tournament and/or charging entry fees, or a combination of both.

We believe these parts are fundamentally flawed. 80% of players have no desire to play in tournaments. Why should they pay for it? They play TCGs at home and with friends. Like most people play board games. There are dozens of dials that can be turned to accomplish a reinvention of a broken system.

So, our first decision to reinvent this process, way back in the early years when Fight Klub was just a concept, was to strip all this cost out of a pack of cards. That does not mean tournaments are not a part of Fight Klub. In fact, we see ways to open them up to people who never participated before. We have a top-to-bottom code rewrite of our tournament ranking system in the works. The goal is to make a simple system where players can upload results 24/7, see the immediate impact on rankings, and any player can choose to participate or not.

I'll give you an example of a possibility. It pays for the entire structure with a unique "foil card" program that is not a part of regular Kilos, and it does not require the 80% of home players to contribute "unless they choose to do so." I'm not saying this is what we will settle on, but it will give you an idea of how we are opening up the thinking.

Imagine that online any player can purchase a pack of tournament tickets for $12 for 12 tournaments. This gives the player the right to upload twelve sanctioned tournament game results at any time during the year. Now, in addition to the tournament tickets, that player gets a unique benefit not found anywhere in the TCG industry.

Once a year, Decipher would make a special pack of a dozen foil cards. These cards come from the pool of all the cards that are made during the entire year. Say, in January of the following year, players who purchased tournament tickets would get to vote on which 12 cards get the "foil treatment." Every player with a subscription and every player who purchased tournament tickets the previous year, would get this special pack of a dozen foil cards sent to them free via regular mail.

If you are a tournament player, you not only get status with your peers and worldwide ranking, but you automatically get 12 unique foil cards that you got to participate in selecting.

If you are not a tournament player, you can choose in January of that given year to purchase the 12 foil cards for $12. There is no cost reduction for you, but you don't have to pay in tournaments if you don't want to and you get a dozen special foil cards for $1 each. You just don't get to vote on which cards are turned into foils, if you don't play in the tournaments.

How can I play a sanctioned tournament at home? Well, all tournaments would have a registered tournament director. Any player can signup online and learn to be a T.D. When tournament results are uploaded on the webpage, the T.D. simply enters the handle of the players and the player's tournament ticket ID. So you can play with four of your friends in your dorm in a sanctioned tournament that impacts your tournament ranking online, and get a dozen special foil cards in the process.

Wouldn't players be able to fake results from home-based tournaments? Well... because we are the single source of cards for Fight Klub and everyone has an account online, the risk for a player or group of players to cheat would be enormous. Any player caught cheating would be banned from purchases and their credit card and address would be blocked. That player would also lose their ranking and the rewards of any players they Mentor.

It's certainly possible someone could cheat for a while (at a cost of $1 for every fake tournament they uploaded), but as soon as they played in the real universe of players, they would be creamed and their ranking would fall like a rock. The end result would be no benefit to faking results. Also, we could easily have requirements for a balance between how many home-based tournaments you could upload vs. play in a more public forum. Rankings could be shown worldwide, by state, or by gang. Gang rivalries are certainly possible with gang vs. gang rankings. We also have ideas on a secret software algorithm that could identify patterns that would help detect fraud. And gangs and peer pressure can go a long way to keeping everyone honest. This is one of the great benefits of knowing every player online vs. the old system where manufacturers only knew a fraction of their players. No system is perfect, but in Fight Klub it's to every players benefit to keep the system honest.

So, all this is a totally new way of ranking players and providing support. As I've said, we are going to let players have a role in flushing out the tournament system with the goal of bringing player choice to a higher level than in any other trading card game.

"You must unlearn what you have learned."