Tinta Arena — home

Home How it works

From a first round to a paid-out result

Three moves. The rules for each one are published before you commit anything, and none of them depend on luck.

The three steps

Pick a title and practise free

Pick a title and practise free

Practice rounds are unlimited and cost nothing. Use them to learn the scoring rules, because every game on the floor rewards something slightly different.

Enter a match on a stated split

Enter a match on a stated split

Each bracket lists its entry, its field size and exactly how the pool divides across finishing places. Both sides start on identical conditions and the replay is kept on file.

Bank it or reinvest it

Bank it or reinvest it

Winnings land in your arena balance. Cash out to your chosen method, or roll the balance into a higher bracket where the field is tougher and the split is wider.

Placement, not points for turning up

Every title measures something different — frags in Smash Karts, chained drift angle in Drift Hunters, board score under a move limit in Tower Swap, round wins in the one-button duels. Whatever that metric is, your raw result is converted into a placement inside your bracket, and the placement is what pays. This matters because it removes the incentive to grind a soft lobby: finishing first against a weak field is worth less than finishing third against a strong one.

Brackets are seeded from recent results for the same reason. A player who has been climbing quickly is drawn against others who have been climbing quickly, which keeps the matches worth playing and makes deliberate under-performance unprofitable rather than merely frowned upon.

What an entry buys

The whole of your entry goes into the pool for that bracket. Nothing is skimmed off the top of a prize pool, and the split across finishing places is printed on the bracket page before the first entry lands. Duels are winner-takes-pool. Larger fields divide across the top few places on a stated ladder — for a twenty-player lobby that is usually the top five, and for a flat score-attack table it is the top ten per cent in equal shares.

Practice is free, unlimited and uses the identical build of the game. There is no “practice version” with different physics, because a practice mode that behaves differently from the paid one would be worse than useless.

The weekly reset

The ladder wipes to zero every Monday at 00:00 AEST. Top seeds from the closing table carry an invitation into the weekend bracket, then everyone starts level. The reset is deliberate: it keeps a newcomer’s first week meaningful instead of asking them to climb past a year of somebody else’s accumulated points, and it stops the table from becoming a record of who joined earliest.

Getting paid

Winnings land in your arena balance immediately when a bracket closes. A cashout request is reviewed within about 24 hours on business days; the first one on an account includes a one-time identity check, which is a legal requirement rather than a discretionary hurdle. You can also leave the balance in place and roll it into a higher bracket, where the field is tougher and the split reaches further down the table.