SafariGal: It's all about the perception of fairness. I posted about this subject on the BrainKing discussion board around the first or second week of February. It all got lost in a big brouhaha caused by an unrelated subject on February 14th.

I proposed letting the tournament organizer keep the profit and giving Fencer a cut of it. I also said to let the organizer be able to set the profit at whatever level he wanted, including no profit at all or even letting him put extra in for a larger purse.

You presently can sponsor a prize tournament yourself without a fee. And notice, these tournaments are widely attended. The fee-to-enter tournaments with a 30% cut seems too high for just about everyone. Fencer did propose adding month extensions for every ten positions filled in the tournament.

I would change the current set up and let the tournament creator set the percentages to whatever levels he likes and for more places. If the total is less than 100%, he shares it with Fencer, say 75%/25% Creator to Fencer. All types of percentages would be tried, but eventually people would enter those tournaments they thought were fair for themselves. I personally would not enter one that took more than 10% out unless I figured my chances of winning a placing prize were very good.

Then there's the problem of the Brains themselves. Not everyone has them yet. This causes the fee-to-enter tournaments to not get started because of lack of people joining. The pool of people with Brains is small. I have 50 Brains. What am I supposed to do with them?