I'd like to share an idea for a "bounty" or an additional special prize money to be awarded based on a tournament result (an online tournament or perhaps even for the Kong Off itself). Just to be clear, I'm not in a position where I'll be able to personally contribute the bounty money this time around, but if anyone else wants to run with this idea and contribute, that would be excellent.
The motivation for this type of prize money is to help increase overall participation in contests and to help increase the competitive nature of the contest all the way down the scoreboard throughout the contest. There are some pretty serious obstacles with contests such as these where a small subset of the possible participants have any realistic chance for prize money. While participating for its own sake just to be part of the community is enough motivation for some, I'm sure that there are plenty of others out there with a "why bother" attitude because they know that they have no shot to win. This reduces overall participation. I believe that the "mystery bounty" concept has done a decent job of addressing this by awarding a prize to a random final placement, but while this may increase overall participation, it does not necessarily achieve the result of fostering more competition throughout the contest all the way down the board. When I see statistics such as 80 people registered, 34 people submitted scores, a few things come to mind. Why did only 80 people register? Out of the 80 who registered, why did only 34 submit scores? The second question seems to have a couple of different answers. Some people register in advance and then forget about the contest or they just don't want to bother with it when it rolls around. Other folks actually DO participate, but they are unable to reach scores that they are proud of during the timeframe of the contest and so they CHOOSE not to submit any scores! In my opinion, both of these results are bad for these contests. In my opinion, the best result is to have as many folks participating and competing AND submitting scores as possible.
My solution is to implement a lottery system, similar to how the first few draft picks of each NBA season are determined. Suppose we ran a contest where 35 people submitted scores and the top 5 scores were awarded prize money. So, 6th place through 35th place are out of the money. In one simple structure of my lottery system idea, we would now award lottery balls to the remaining participants as follows:
35th place: 1 lottery ball
34th place: 2 lottery balls
33rd place: 3 lottery balls
32nd place: 4 lottery balls
etc.
8th place: 28 lottery balls
7th place: 29 lottery balls
6th place: 30 lottery balls
If it was determined that there would be one lottery winner (winning a prize equivalent to 5th place money, for example), then one ball would be drawn and that player would win the prize. In this particular example, there would be a total of 465 lottery balls. Last place for the contest would have a 1 / 465 = 0.215% chance of winning. 6th place for the contest (the highest score out of the prize money) would have a 30 / 465 = 6.452% chance of winning.
So, the idea here is that every placement that you move up on the board towards the end of the contest has value! Every participant should be putting in full effort to get their score just a little higher. A higher final placement on the scoreboard means a greater chance at winning the lottery prize! Plus, those players who have been playing but not submitting scores would now be foolish to hold back their scores because not submitting means that you give up any chance at winning the lottery prize.
Obviously, the details are flexible. The tournament organizers might decide to have multiple (say, 5, for example) lottery winners. They may or may not stipulate that each player can win a maximum of 1 lottery prize, so if their lottery number is drawn a second time, the ball is just thrown back into the drum and the drawing is repeated until there are the requisite number of different lottery winners drawn for the contest. Payout structures can vary also according to all sorts of mathematical formulas. The number of lottery balls could double for each placement: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc so that the bubble boy for the contest (6th place in this example) actually has approximately a 50% chance to win the lottery prize. Structures could be created similar to poker tournaments where the "winner" (6th place in this example) might win, say, 18% of all available lottery balls, the next placement gets about 12% of the balls, the next around 9%, then 7% and so on in a sort of pseudo-logarithmic pattern until all lottery balls are distributed. You get the idea.
Anyway, I hope that someone in the community considers and runs with this idea because I think you'll find that there will be an extra level of excitement amongst those participants that typically end up somewhere in the middle of the scoreboard because now every placement will count!
