The Weekly
HOLD IT

Every Saturday at 8:00 pm Eastern. Up to 100 players. One button. Last person holding wins.

DUMB is in early testing and isn’t in the app stores yet, so registering needs a tester build for now. The tournament is just for fun: champions get a badge and the winner card. There is no cash or other prize.

How an evening works

1. Register in the app any time during the week. The first 100 players are entrants; anyone after that is a reserve, in order.
2. Check in between 7:30 and 7:55 pm ET. Open the app, tap “I’m here”, and a quick connection test runs. From 7:50, places not claimed by entrants go to checked-in reserves.
3. Rooms are drawn at 7:55. Everyone is dealt into rooms of up to 10, as evenly as possible.
4. Round 1 starts at 8:00. Wait for GO, then press and hold. Let go, and you’re out. The last person holding in each room goes through.
5. Review. Three minutes after the last room finishes, results are checked and certified. Next, the players who went through get a two-minute call to their next room.
6. The final. When 10 or fewer players are left, they play one final room. The last one holding is the champion.

Rules

Rules version hold-it-tournament/0.1.0. Once an event is published, its rules and prize terms don’t change; any change is announced in the app.

Entering

• You must be 18 or older. You confirm this when you register.
• Entry is free. Nothing you buy affects entry, rooms or results.
• Registration closes when check-in closes, or once twice the capacity has registered.
• You can unregister until check-in closes. Your place goes to the first reserve.
• If fewer than 10 players check in, the event is cancelled and nobody is penalized.

Playing

• The game is the same as a casual match: a 3-second countdown, then GO. You have 2 seconds to press, then you must keep holding.
• Your hold ends if you let go, if the touch is interrupted, if you leave the app, or if the game loses contact with your phone for more than 5 seconds.
• Be in the app when your room opens. Anyone not connected and ready within 60 seconds is out.
• If only one player in a room is ready, they go through by walkover, marked “W/O” in the results. If nobody is ready, nobody goes through from that room.
• Problems with your own phone or network don’t earn a replay. The 5-second grace period is there for short drops.

Time limits and ties

• Each round has a 15-minute limit and the final has 20 minutes. At the limit, everyone still holding goes through. In the final, everyone still holding is a co-champion.
• If the last releases in a room are within 50 milliseconds of each other, it’s a tie. In a round, everyone tied goes through. In the final, the tied players play a sudden-death final after a 60-second break, up to twice. If they tie a third time, they are co-champions.

Review and disputes

• Results show as provisional until certified. You can report your room from the app until its review window closes, choosing one of: cheating, connection, wrong result, or other.
• Reported rooms are decided by a person. They can certify the result, replay the room with the same players, or disqualify a player; every decision is logged with its reason.
• If a reported room is still undecided 10 minutes after review closes, it is replayed. The next round starts without it, and whoever goes through joins that round in a room of their own.
• If our servers fail, the room is replayed right away. If that fails too, the event pauses with a banner in the app. If it can’t resume within 30 minutes, it is cancelled with no champion.

Fair draws

Rooms are drawn by a computer from a secret random seed. When check-in opens, we publish a fingerprint of the seed: its SHA-256 hash. We reveal the seed itself once round 1 has started. With the seed, anyone can recompute every room and check that no draw was hand-picked. Players are ordered by SHA-256(seed, round, player) and dealt into rooms in snake order.

Results

Champions