When sports shut down in 2020, bettors had nothing left to bet on, and plenty of them turned to online poker. In March 2020, WSOP.com’s 18-event online circuit generated nearly $4M in prize pools, more than three times its guarantee. David Reiter, a longtime tournament poker player, noticed how much of that surge came from sports bettors and started building a tournament format for them.
That format is now live. Reiter’s company, Bet Max Action, has launched Bet Max Tourney, a free-to-play app on iOS and Android. Every player in a tournament starts with the same stack of Tournament Dollars (TD$), bets it on real game odds, and competes on a live leaderboard that moves as games settle.
“Why do poker players get tournament-style competition, but sports bettors don’t? I never heard a good answer, so we built one,” Reiter said in a press statement.
Tournaments run on straight bets and parlays (spreads, totals, and moneylines) across more than 27 leagues, from major US sports to international soccer. TD$ have no cash value. Winning picks grow a stack and losing picks shrink it. To qualify for the final rankings, a player has to put the entire stack in play before the tournament ends, so nobody wins by sitting on a lead. Contests can run daily, weekly, monthly, or across a full season.
Seven game modes change the route to the top. Tourney, the flagship, crowns the biggest stack at the end. Longshot adds a TD$ profit boost for hitting an underdog, Streaks pays more for consecutive wins, and Survivor ends a player’s run on the first loss. Bracket, Squads, and One Shot, which locks in picks once with no reinvesting, round out the list. Friends can run any of it privately through Bet Max Pools, where the host, the “Bet Max Commish,” picks the format and sports and shares an invite link.
The consumer app is only part of the plan. The same engine is available through Bet Max Partner Tools. Casinos, iGaming operators, leagues, media brands, and entertainment venues can launch a hosted tournament app with their own branding, embed tournament cards on their sites, or build on the API behind Bet Max Tourney. The company says a hosted app can be live in days. Free-to-play contests and sponsor-funded prizes are the engagement hook for partners, and private pools are a way for them to grow first-party data.
“We built Bet Max to supplement the sportsbook, not replace it,” Reiter said. “Operators and media brands already have the audience. A tournament gives that audience a reason to stay involved throughout the course of the contest.”
Poker’s tournament structure keeps showing up in sports betting. In August, we covered The Sharps, which built a poker-style tournament app for skill-based sports predictions in 12 weeks. Bet Max sells a white-label version alongside its own app. How far it reaches may depend as much on the operators and media brands that pick up Partner Tools as on the players who download the app.
