Play to win the pot of money

Every now and then, we used to run an event called "Win the Pot." We would start with, say $100 in the pot. The first person to win would get half of the pot. But, each person that played had to pay $1. If they did not win, the pot would increase to $101, then $102, etc, and keep building until someone won the pot. Half the pot would be given away, then we would start over with a new pot.

Of course, it was always someone vs. one of our top players. When our players won, they did not get the pot, and the pot would grow.

Since it was all done online, everyone could see who paid to add to the pot, and the result of the game was easy enough to see. The new pot was always announced at the start of each game. Since many games would be played at one time, it was in your best interest to not take too long to post a move.

What do you guys think about playing in an event like that?

The Twinch Channel on here has subscribers that fund chess players all day long. Ben Finegold, etc, do this for recreation and fun. He plays some very fast time controls, even game-in-10-seconds. Yesterday he won 95 out of 97 fast games, and still lost 10 rating points. He was lamenting this. But, the two guys that won, that were his paid supporters, got no money at all.

In this setup, the winners get paid. After collecting $1 per game, there would be close to $100 + the starting pot of $100, and the first guy to have won would have received nearly $100.

Surely you can't be opposed to such a thing, given the payments all go one way here and on Twich.

I'm just asking the question: Do you guys find it interesting? A simple yes or no would suffice.

Our biggest winner of 2005 took down over $300 for playing one 10-minute game on the Gothic Chess server. We might try implementing this again. We might not.