grenv: About the points: I don't know. I didn't think about it. It was just a number thrown at random while trying to explain that the number of points you start with doesn't have much impact on the length of the game... I guess that in my example, if the bonus was still 500 points everybody would go for the prize, place a bet of 30 and then the pond would finish in the next move... problem solved :)

I would suggest you didn't keep your totals throughout the tournament. It wouldn't be fair for the players that had to place high bets to survive their rounds and ended up with just a couple thousand points to have to face the player whose opponents never played and so he finished his round with the whole 20000.

By the way: there would be the option for more than one player to go to the next round. If, for instance, there were three rounds to start with, the best 4 or 5 players of each round would get to go upstream to the final so the final pond would still a fair amount of players.

Czuch Thanks. I've been told one too many times that I can only be an idiot from all the ideas I have . Looks like you just confirmed it :D