Console cash tournaments

You pay a fixed entry fee, take a seat in a single-elimination bracket, and play your matches on the same consoles and the same online modes you would use for a 1v1. Win and you advance; lose once and you are out. The prize pool and the amount attached to every paid place are published on the cup page before registration opens, so you know what finishing 4th pays before you enter. Registration closes at kickoff.

That is the whole format. There is no seeding fee, no re-buy and no second bracket for knocked-out players — a cup is one run at a published prize table.

The entry fee buys a seat, and it does not fund the whole pool. In the Madden 27 Cup, 32 entries at $5 brought in $160, while the published pool was $200. Locked put the difference — $40 — in on top. A full field pays out more than it pays in, which is the opposite of how a rake works.

The other half of the answer is how thinly it spreads: 8 of 32 finishers were paid, and the winner turned a $5 entry into $100 — about 20×. The other 24 got nothing. A bracket is a lottery-shaped payoff on a skill-shaped contest, and a 1v1 match is not.

Every figure above is read from the cup's own configuration, so this page and the cup page cannot disagree about the money.

A 1v1 money match is two players putting up the same amount against each other. Both stakes lock in escrow when the match is accepted, the winner is credited the whole pot minus a flat 10%, and nobody else is involved — two $10 stakes make a $20 pot that pays $18. A cup replaces that with one entry fee, a published pool, and several paid finishers.

The 1v1 rules — equal stakes, escrow, the flat 10% fee, disputes reviewed by a human admin — are on how it works and the pricing page. A cup entry is a different transaction, and each cup page states its own terms.

Cups have run on EA Sports FC 26 and on Madden, including Madden NFL 27. Every title a cup runs on is also stakeable as a 1v1: the picker carries EA Sports FC 26, EA Sports FC 27, Madden NFL 27, Madden NFL 26, NBA 2K27 and NBA 2K26. So a cup is never the only way to play a title for money — it is the bracket-shaped way.

The franchise pages cover the 1v1 side of each: Madden money matches, EA FC money matches and NBA 2K money matches.

Four, newest first, and all four have finished. The other three were free to enter and funded entirely by Locked; the Madden 27 Cup was the only one with an entry fee. Each links to its own page, where the payout table names every place that was paid.

There is no fifth on the calendar yet. When a cup is scheduled it gets its own page, a row in the table above, and an announcement in the #open-challenges Discord, which carries every public 1v1 in the meantime. A cup is the occasional thing; the 1v1 lobby is the daily one.

Locked also publishes cup payout tables winner by winner — every place, every username, every amount — on the EA FC 26 results page and the Madden 26 results page. Naming the people who were paid is the only version of this claim a reader can check.

If you want to play tonight, stake a 1v1: a cup only exists when one is scheduled, there is none today, and a bracket takes an evening either way. If you want the biggest number a small amount of money can turn into, the cup is the one that pays 20× the entry at the top. If you want the outcome to track your skill as closely as possible, the 1v1 is the better instrument: one opponent, one match, no draw luck.

If the answer is the 1v1, the next question is who you play it against — where to find an opponent covers the open lobby, the Discord feed and the one-tap rematch, and why the edition you own decides who you can face at all.

New accounts should read the welcome offer terms before depositing, and what escrow does and does not cover before trusting any platform in this category, Locked included.