Inspired by a post from sodom-lv, I finally decided to do something I had mostly avoided during my time with Splinterlands: I entered tournaments.
For whatever reason, tournaments were never really my thing. When I first started playing Splinterlands, I simply didn't participate in them. Looking back, I'm not even sure exactly why. Maybe I was afraid of losing. Maybe I had the feeling that tournaments were something for the really competitive players. Or maybe I just didn't want to spend DEC on an entry fee when I wasn't sure I could get anything back.
Whatever the reason, I stayed away from them. Coming back to Splinterlands after my long break made me look at the game a little differently. I'm currently exploring modes and activities that I either didn't play before or simply never paid much attention to. So when I saw the post from sodom-lv, I thought: Why not give tournaments a proper try?
I didn't expect great placements. In fact, I already suspected that I wasn't going to be particularly good at them. But that was almost beside the point. I wanted to answer a much simpler question: Can I actually make a profit by playing tournaments?
And, of course, there was another question I couldn't ignore: Why am I so bad at this? :D
Apparently, I have some catching up to do
The answer to that question became pretty obvious during the first tournaments.
I've been away from Splinterlands for roughly a year, and during that time quite a lot has happened. There are new cards, new abilities, new Rulesets and new game modes. Even though I know the game well and was an experienced player before my break, I sometimes feel like I have returned to a game that has continued developing without me. But there is one thing that overwhelms me more than anything else is the sheer number of cards. There are just so many of them.
And it's not simply a matter of remembering which card does what. You also have to remember the abilities, how they interact with each other, what they mean for a particular Ruleset and which combinations might make sense in a given situation. And then I remember that some of these cards apparently have about six different abilities. Was it always like this? I honestly don't remember. This is probably one of the biggest differences I notice compared with my old Splinterlands experience. I know the game, but I no longer know the current game as well as I used to.
And tournaments expose that gap very quickly.
But I didn't want to give up
At that point, I could have simply decided that tournaments weren't for me. Instead, I decided to make the lack of experience part of the experiment. I'm not entering these tournaments expecting to suddenly finish at the top of the leaderboard. Right now, I simply want to play them, get a feeling for the format and see whether I can improve over time. And there is another reason to keep going. I wanted to find out whether the whole thing makes economic sense. So I started keeping track of my entries and rewards.
To make the numbers easier to compare, I'm using 8.5 DEC = 1 SPS for the conversion.
I then looked at six tournaments I participated in. The individual tournament names aren't particularly important to me here. What matters is what I paid, what I received and what the final result looked like. In the first tournament, I paid a 50 DEC entry fee and received 21.1 SPS as a reward. At the conversion rate above, that was worth 179.35 DEC. The next one cost me 100 DEC, but the 26.6 SPS prize converted to 226.10 DEC. The pattern continued with the smaller tournaments as well. A 25 DEC entry resulted in 10.5 SPS, worth 89.25 DEC. I had essentially the same result in another 25 DEC tournament. Then came the biggest tournament I tracked. I paid 200 DEC to enter and received 53.2 SPS, which converted to 452.20 DEC. The final tournament cost another 50 DEC and gave me 21.1 SPS, again worth 179.35 DEC.
Putting everything together, I had spent 450 DEC on tournament entries. The prizes I received were worth a total of 1,215.50 DEC. That leaves me with a plus of 765.50 DEC.
And honestly? That's not bad at all. It's certainly not enough to make me suddenly consider myself a professional tournament player. But the original question was simply whether I could make a profit.
So I'm going to keep doing it
The result has definitely encouraged me to continue. Not because I suddenly expect to dominate tournaments. Quite the opposite. I still have a lot to learn. What I find interesting is that tournaments might actually be a pretty good way for me to get back into the current Splinterlands meta. Every tournament forces me to look at cards I might otherwise ignore, think about combinations I haven't used for a long time and pay attention to Rulesets that I may not have encountered recently. The enormous card pool that currently overwhelms me might therefore become less intimidating simply through repetition. At some point, I hope that instead of looking at a tournament lineup and thinking "There are way too many possibilities here," I'll be able to look at it and immediately recognize a few good options.
That is probably going to take some time.
For now, I'm happy with the experiment.
I gave tournaments a try after avoiding them for years, discovered that I'm not particularly good at them yet, and still managed to come out with a positive result. That's enough of a reason for me to keep going. Maybe I'll get better. Maybe I'll start understanding the current card pool again. And who knows – perhaps one day I'll even enter a tournament without feeling completely overwhelmed by all those cards. Until then, I'll keep playing and keep learning.
Disclaimer
Referral
If you're just getting started with Splinterlands – feel free to use my referral link:
https://splinterlands.com/register?ref=zephid83
It helps support my journey and, hopefully, we'll see each other in-game.
Disclaimer
All graphics have been created with AI.