BringIt.com Allows Players to Bet On Console Game Matches

eldavojohn writes to tell us of a new service, "BringIt.com," that allows gamers to put their money where their mouth is with respect to their console gaming skill. "BringIt supports the PlayStation 2, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Players challenge each other on the site, but play on their consoles. BringIt holds players' entry fees until the game is finished. After the game is done, it verifies the results and credits the winner, minus the service fee. To attract players of a broad range of skill sets, BringIt has separate tournaments meant for novice players and expert gamers. Levin compared it to the handicap system in golf or the weight-class system in wrestling.

Comments

Great, just great

[Illender]

This is perfect! I can just quit my job, and bet on myself. And my mom said playing games would do nothing for me.

Re:Great, just great

[sys.stdout.write]

This is just a simple way for geeks to get back their lunch money.

No, this is a way for Korea to become the economic powerhouse of the world.

Re:rigged

[Anonymous Coward]

The service fee.

Cheating

[bjourne]

Maybe technology has advanced since last I played console games.. But wouldn't cheating be a huge issue? Cheaters were annoying when you just played fps games for fun, annoying but tolerable. Now if you are betting money and you suspect that your opponents cheat, then you would be pissed.

Wagers+HonorSystem=

[Itninja]

What could possibly go wrong? From the BringIt.com rules page: "When the game is completed, both you and your opponent must report and verify the results." If my experience with the gamers on XBox Live is any indication, maybe 1 in 5 of the losers will report it. And 4 of 5 of losers will 'dispute' the results.

Usually the way it works is like this: I am playing a ranked match against somebody named some variant of '420niggah' (classy I know) and as soon as I am about to drop a coup de grace, they just quit. YOu what would make that even more fun? Losing real money each time it happens. No thanks.

Re:Wagers+HonorSystem=

[sanosuke001]

The only way I see this working is if they have a system like eBay does with positive/negative comments. If someone bails on matches on a regular basis, then nobody would play them. If you are a respectable citizen of the site, then people will trust that you will honor the bet.

It might be a bit harder to get started but once you're established, it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

Also, I'd like to see a ranking system be implemented. Kind of like with Go. KGS uses a pretty decent ranking system with their online software. Basing your rank off the people you've played against. Have a separate rank for each game you play. Allow "rank" games with no wager and those with a wager so that someone new can work up their rank so people would play them. Require 20-30 ranked games before they can start betting and it would probably be a very robust system. Limiting the bets based on how many total games you have would also help people get their credibility up as more people would play you if they don't have to bet $20+ on someone with no reputation on the site.

Re:Wagers+HonorSystem=

[Inda]

I ran a league with some friends 10 years back. We had 300 - 400 players. Everything was done on trust.

The majority of cheaters were stupid. Registering new accounts and posting 40 wins within an hour was a classic. Registering multiple accounts was another - we tracked IP numbers. Poorly edited screen grabs were easy to spot - lossy jpegs show changes easily.

In the end reputation was king. With a small number of people, everyone knew each other. We also took part in our own leagues.

The caught cheaters used to go to great lengths to get even with us for banning them. Forum exploits, DOS attacks, and general annoyances. Funny because we offered no prizes except a name on a 'winners' page.

Good luck to these people. They'll need it.

Re:Wagers+HonorSystem=

[DeadDecoy]

I don't know. Considering the lengths to which people went to when money wasn't involved, I would bet that this system would tempt the even more clever cheaters to get involved. When money is involved, you could justify spending more time developing methods of gaming the system. Just look at the systems brokers setup to do stock trading: clusters which could do trading on micro-second transactions. I just hope bringit.com has reasonable security experts.

Re:Wagers+HonorSystem=

[FrostDust]

I am playing a ranked match against somebody named some variant of '420niggah' (classy I know) and as soon as I am about to drop a coup de grace, they just quit. YOu what would make that even more fun? Losing real money each time it happens. No thanks.

Starcraft (and that's more than a decade old) recorded "Disconnects." Having a record like "15-12-37" would lead people to not play against you, either cause you're a sore loser or because you have a really terrible connection. I haven't used any of the current gen systems' online multiplayer services, but I think they'd be able to implement counting disconnects for each user easily.

Also, I didn't check out Bringit's rules but it makes sense that they'd put into terms that disconnecting counts as a loss.

Rankings

[nitsew]

How do they rank players? Couldn't an expert player just pose as a novice, and win easily?

Re:Rankings

[Chris Burke]

How do they rank players? Couldn't an expert player just pose as a novice, and win easily?

Yeah I was chuckling thinking about that, and hearing their CEO comparing it to wrestling weight classes.

On the one hand, that makes no sense, because weight classes have nothing to do with separating people based on skill, but rather simple physical attributes and the unfair advantage that stems from them. Even the most skilled 110 pounder on earth is going to get smushed into the mat by a competent 275 pounder.

On the other hand, it makes perfect sense, because wrestlers are all about gaming the weight class system as much as possible. That's why they starve themselves, and run five miles wearing a dozen sweatshirts and/or plastic bags the day before weigh-in to lose water weight, all so that when they walk onto the mat in the "150lb" weight class they're sporting the body of a 170 pounder. In practice this just means everyone is really a couple weight classes heavier than what they wrestle at. But that's because you can't easily change your weight, and your weight class is defined by what you weigh at weigh-in. You can't wrestle at 130 a couple weeks then gain some weight but stay at 130. If you could? Yeah you'd see people cutting so much weight they couldn't stand up right just so that later at a more important match they'd have an advantage.

Anyway, I'm assuming/hoping it's a sort of ladder system and that the size of wagers is capped at each level. It's one thing to have someone sandbagging and pool shark you out of $10, yet another when Mr. Franklin gets involved.

Re:rigged

[Khashishi]

yourself. Otherwise it would be plain gambling.

Re:Aren't gambling sites illegal?

[Anonymusing]

Just to save you the time, the headline of TFA ends with the words "Legal in 39 States". And that article links to this which says you can't play video games for cash in Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Tennessee and Vermont.

Four places

[Anonymous Coward]

Delaware, Oregon and Montana now allow sports betting.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4162225

Re:rigged

[GigsVT]

It's not gambling if it's a game of skill. You can charge an entry fee for a game of skill and pay a prize in pretty much every state of the US.