Our coverage of the Main Event last night was particularly difficult towards the end as an ever-so-slightly inebriated Franke von Zweigbergk kept pestering us with some nonsense about the Sportsbook events. Once Martin Mauthner had taken it down though, we chased Franke down and discovered that he'd somehow won not just the freeroll, but all three events. He sent us over to Mark Joa from Acroud who developed the software to explain to us how such a thing could be possible (and explain how the whole thing works).
"So what I do for The Festival is we provide the technical platform for the Sportsbook tournament," Joa told us, "Basically a player-versus-player platform where you don't know the odds before the game starts. So you bet on different things like scores or head-to-head match ups and you don't know how the others are going to predict, and you're trying to guess the outcome of a football match for example, but also guess what outcome the other players are going to predict.
"Each match has a certain number of chips that are going to be divided between all the correct answers. So let's say there are 11 players, two correct answers, and 10 chips per player for this match-up. So that's 1,100 chips divided by two.
Is this the first time they've run this kind of tournament, we asked.
"For this festival we tried some new things, but we've been developing it for a year now and have been trying out different formats for the past six months or so with Franke and Acroud. I'd say we've done 10-20 tournaments now, every time a little bit different." Is the current format perfect then? "I don't know! We're definitely going to improve it for the next time, but I think the concept is great."
So what happened with the sportsbook events here at The Festival in Bratislava? I ask because to the casual observer it might look a bit suspicious that The Festival organiser Franke von Zweigbergk won all three sportsbook events - the freeroll, the lowroll and the highroll events. "Ha! It was fortunate and unfortunate at the same time, I would say. Because, yeah - Franke is probably the person most familiar with this pool-betting concept, especially what we have, so I think it shows that it is a skill game because he won all three. But also it showed that you don't need to know too much about sports betting to win! I think what Franke did the best was he bet on underdogs because he thought that others would bet on the favourites, so he won a lot of scoops. I'd summarise it as, like in poker tournaments, any fish can win."
Sports Beting Tournaments Results
Freeroll results (top three won an entry to the lowroll event)
1 - Nequam1981
2 - Franke
3 - Roby
Lowroll (€30 + €5) results
1 - Franke (€188.31)
2 - Bengan (€109.97)
3 - BobbyTGC (€64.22)
4 - Olov (€37.50)
The Gambling Cabin Sportsbook Main Event (€225 + €25) results
1 - Franke (€1,700)
2 - Timman (€774)
