The Tomigaia Blog

Internet Cash Tournaments: A new way to go?

After years of growth the Internet is said to be stagnating by some. Many sites are shutting down because there is no more money out there to be made in advertising or in selling content to consumers.

In fact, some sites have been forced to change into sex related businesses to survive. In parallel growth with porn and sex-related sites, there are gambling sites. The number of ways to gamble on the net always seems to be growing. One new kind of gambling site that I discovered recently allows users to participate in a legal kind of gambling, called "cash tournaments". These are games, like pool, where players put money into a pot, and then play in a tournament. The winner of the tournament wins most the money in the pot (games site takes it's flat fee out of the pot for facilitating the game). One restriction is that only US citizens and read or residents of the US over age 18 are allowed to play. When you win a tournament, you get points, and you can then convert those points back into money at the same rates of 100 points to one dollar. MiniClip and GameTrust, built the this gaming system together, and it seems popular was sometimes 500 users in games at a time. They seem to have solved all the security issues with Java applet games, as well as the physics of pool.

For people who are lovers of pool and gambling this game system must be extremely addictive. I worry about compulsive gamblers and how they could lose all their money very quickly to games like this. Some people are winning hundreds of dollars per week playing this game! On the other hand, this may be a valid form of entertainment on the Internet.

If the GameTrust system ever is integrated with the micro payment systems developed by Peppercoin and the like, I believe that there will be an explosion in Internet gambling, and perhaps a new business model for many gaming sites.