The champions tournament

Every regular BurnBola game produces two finalists — the winner and the runner-up. The champions tournament is a second, free super-draw those finalists can enter, with a pot built from the house's own earnings. It fires once every 100 finished games.

How the pot is built

You never pay into it. The pot grows purely from the lottery's own money:

• a slice of every commission the lottery earns running games, and
• when a game ends with no winner, 50% of its jackpot rolls straight into the tournament pot (the other 50% seeds the next game's jackpot).

It just grows, game after game.

The two finalists — and the pass

Each finished game mints two transferable passes (NFTs):

• 🏆 Winner pass (gold) — to the game's sole survivor.
• 🥈 Finalist pass (silver) — to the runner-up: the player burned in the final round, when the game goes from two survivors down to one.

A finalist claims their pass themselves (a tiny mint cost). Passes are real bearer titles — you can hold, sell, or enter them. Whoever holds a pass decides what to do with it before its tournament draws:

• Sell it on the in-app pass market for SOL (a fixed price you set; the house takes a flat 1% from the seller), or
• Enter it into the tournament for a shot at the pot.

You can't do both — and entering is final (see below).

⚠️ Exit and you forfeit your pass

A pass is a reward for staying in. If you exit, you take your exit payout and you're out — no winner pass, no finalist pass. Specifically:

• 🏆 Gold goes only to the last survivor.
• 🥈 Silver goes only to the player burned in the final two-to-one round — i.e. someone who stayed and lost the last burn, not someone who exited.
• Edge case: if a game ends because players exited down to a single survivor (for example, two players holding one ticket each and one exits), there was no final burn — so no silver pass is created that game at all. The remaining player is simply the winner.

In short: exiting cashes you out and removes you from finalist contention.

Closed batches of 100 — with no downtime

Each tournament is funded by exactly one batch of 100 games. The contract counts games as they start (leave the sale phase); when the batch's games have finished, the pot is sealed — the draw pays out exactly that sealed amount, and not a lamport of newer games' money can leak into it.

The launchpad doesn't stop for the show, though: games created while a tournament is drawing simply belong to the next batch — their skims accumulate for the next pot from the first block. The only moment new-game creation waits is the short stretch between the batch filling up (its 100th game started) and the pot being sealed.

So the rhythm is:

1. 100 games start and fund the pot.
2. The batch fills; its games finish out; the pot is sealed on-chain.
3. The tournament opens its entry window, the finalists enter, and the draw fires — while the next batch of games is already selling.
4. The counter rolls on; every batch pays only its own champions.

All of it is enforced on-chain — nobody (not even us) can pour a fresh game's money into a draw already in flight, or hold the sealed pot back from its finalists.

Claiming and entering — within your batch

A pass is tied to the game that minted it, and that game belongs to one tournament cycle. You can enter it any time before that tournament draws — the moment you've claimed it, you're free to enter; you don't have to wait for or catch a narrow window. A pass from a past cycle is a keepsake — it can't be entered into a later tournament. So: win or place, grab your pass, and enter it while its tournament is live.

⚠️ Entering is final — the pass burns

Entering a pass into the tournament burns it on the spot. You're sacrificing the pass for a shot at the pot: the pass is gone the instant you enter, win or lose. If your pass is drawn, you take the SOL pot — paid straight to your wallet. If it isn't, you get nothing, and the pass has already burned.

So each pass is yours to do one of three things with:

• Keep it — do nothing. The pass stays yours, forever. Entering is the only thing that burns a pass, so simply not entering is how you keep it. Once its tournament has drawn, the pass becomes a keepsake: it can't be entered into any future tournament (it's bound to its own cycle), but it remains in your wallet to hold or sell.
• Sell it for a guaranteed price on the pass market, or
• Enter it and gamble the pass for a chance at a much bigger pot.

There's no middle ground on entering and no take-backs — once entered, a pass can't be sold or recovered. But if you never enter it, you never lose it.

The draw — two pools, equal odds

When the tournament fires, the lottery takes a flat 1% off the top of the pot (its only cut of the tournament), and the rest is split between two pools:

• 75% to the winners pool (gold-pass holders),
• 25% to the finalists pool (silver-pass holders).

Within each pool a single verifiable random draw picks one champion, and every entry has equal odds — one pass, one chance. Each pool's champion takes their pool's share, paid straight to their wallet.

If a pool has no entrants, its share rolls to the other pool; if a pool has a single entrant, they take the whole share. After the draw the counter resets and the next tournament starts filling.

No entry fee, no rounds, no exits inside it — just a recurring bonus jackpot for the people who play to the end.