Turn Your FPS Skills Into Cash

Game|Life is posting about a new agreement between Valve and an outfit called Tournament.com that will allow for an official Counter-Strike/Half-Life 2 Multiplayer game competition service. It sounds a lot like online poker tournaments, where players ante into a pot and the winner walks away with the results. "Another option is a perpetual, ongoing game that players can drop into at any time. If you get killed, you lose $1. If you kill another player, you get $1. When your virtual 'wallet' is out of money, you're done playing. Until you add some more funds with a credit card or PayPal, that is. For now, Tournament.com is strictly small stakes. Entry fees for the example tournaments were $3.60 for each of six players, with an $18 pot split between first, second, and third place. Company representatives said they're considering high-roller tournaments, but want to make sure the service has been fully field-tested, and potential cheating methods blocked off, before big money starts getting thrown around." One of the findings of the SOE White Paper was that some people are perfectly happy making money off of their gaming hobby. How long before we see similar livelihoods via this service?

Comments

Re:Great idea.

[Eivind]

Bots aren't terribly good at psychology, which plays a large role in Poker. So that kind of fully-automated playing-bot has a hard time beating really good players.

But, it's trivial to write a program that for example:

• Remembers precisely every game that was played, so knows exactly which cards are left in the deck. (good players do this too, more or less anyways)
• Instantly calculates all relevant odds; With the cards that are now remaining in the deck, your odds of getting that straigth is 1:72. Precise information is valuable and will help, allthough a good player will approximate this too.

And that is ignoring outrigth cheating, such as playing 2 people in a team on one table, without letting the other players know you're a team. That's an advantage because a) it doubles your available information and b) your chances of having the best hand is double, but your losses won't be, because you can make sure that only the one with the best hand bets high. (should be done in moderation lest it be suspicious)