How tournament scoring works
How is a tournament score calculated?
Your score is your net return for the session, reduced by a drawdown penalty for excess risk and a haste penalty for very short trades.
Score = NetPnL%
− DDmultiplier × max(0, MaxDrawdown% − DDthreshold)
− HastePenalty
The three inputs:
- NetPnL% — your net profit or loss for the session, as a percentage of your starting capital. Every entrant starts with $10,000 in simulated capital, so a $400 gain is +4%.
- MaxDrawdown% — the furthest your account fell below its highest balance during the session (balance = your starting capital plus profit from closed trades). Paper profit you give back on an open trade does not count — only real losses do (a closed loss, or an open position that is currently underwater). It measures the risk you took, not just where you ended up.
- HastePenalty — a penalty for trades closed too quickly to be a real decision (see below).
What is the drawdown penalty?
The drawdown penalty subtracts points only for the drawdown you take beyond a threshold — risk within the threshold is free, risk past it is charged.
Each tournament has a drawdown threshold and a drawdown multiplier. The penalty is the multiplier applied to the part of your maximum drawdown that exceeds the threshold:
penalty = multiplier × max(0, MaxDrawdown% − threshold)
Only the excess above the threshold is penalised, and it is a smooth function — there is no cliff at the threshold edge. A trader who never exceeds the threshold pays no drawdown penalty at all. A trader who does pays in proportion to how far past it they went.
Are the drawdown numbers the same in every tournament?
Yes. Every standard tournament is a 30-minute game that uses the same drawdown rule — so there is one line to learn, not a different one per lobby.
| Drawdown threshold | 10% |
|---|---|
| Drawdown multiplier | 1.5× |
A handful of special events — the weekend flagships and the occasional monthly or admin-run tournament — can run longer and use different values. When they do, the exact numbers are always shown on that tournament's own page, so there is never a hidden surprise.
What is the haste penalty?
Every trade you close in under 30 seconds adds a penalty of 0.5times the absolute value of that trade's profit or loss percent.
Over a few seconds, price movement is mostly noise, so very fast trades behave more like a coin flip than a decision. The penalty uses the absolute value of the trade's PnL — so a fast win is penalised just as much as a fast loss. That is deliberate: if only fast losses were penalised, scalpers would keep their lucky fast wins.
For each trade held under 30 seconds: penalty += 0.5 × |trade PnL%|
How is the final ranking decided?
Traders are ranked by score, highest first. Two tiebreakers settle equal scores.
- 1. Higher score wins. The risk-adjusted score above.
- 2. Lower maximum drawdown wins. If scores are equal, the trader who took less risk to get there ranks higher.
- 3. Earlier registration wins. The final tiebreaker.
Note that both the score itself and the first tiebreaker reward low drawdown — risk control is rewarded twice over.
What does this look like in practice?
Two traders in the same standard tournament (10% threshold, 1.5×multiplier).
| Trader A — net return | +18% |
|---|---|
| Trader A — max drawdown | 24% |
| Trader A — score | 18 − 1.5 × (24 − 10) = 18 − 21 = −3.0 |
| Trader B — net return | +9% |
| Trader B — max drawdown | 7% |
| Trader B — score | 9 − 0 (drawdown under 10% threshold) = +9.0 |
On raw profit, Trader A's +18% beats Trader B's +9% easily. On the Sivex Play score, Trader B wins decisively — A's 24% drawdown is so far past the 10% threshold that the penalty wipes out the entire gain and pushes the score negative. The trader who managed risk best wins.
The practical takeaway: protect your downside. A controlled, smaller gain frequently out-ranks a larger gain that came with a punishing drawdown. To see how scoring makes the whole competition skill-based rather than luck-based, read is Sivex Play gambling.
Common questions
- Is the highest profit always the winner?
- No. Sivex Play scores risk-adjusted return, not raw profit. Profit beyond a per-tournament drawdown threshold is reduced by a penalty, so a trader who made a large gain by carrying a deep drawdown can rank below a trader who made a smaller gain more steadily.
- Is the drawdown threshold the same in every tournament?
- Yes — every scheduled tournament uses the same values: a 10% drawdown threshold and a 1.5× multiplier. One rule across every lobby, so you always know where the line is.
- Why are very short trades penalised?
- Every trade closed under 30 seconds adds a haste penalty of 0.5 times the absolute value of that trade’s PnL%. It uses the absolute value so fast wins are penalised too. This discourages coin-flip scalping, which is closer to chance than to skill.
- How are ties broken?
- If two traders finish on the same score, the lower maximum drawdown wins; if still tied, the earlier registration wins.
◆ Keep learning
What a skill-based trading tournament is, how a session runs from registration to payout, and how competing against the lobby differs from trading the market.
What a hosted tournament is, why the host has no advantage, and how the Creator Clash, Interval Kings and crews work for players who join one.
How a creator’s community enters a Sivex Play tournament together, how a crew is scored on its top 10 rather than its size, and how the winning crew’s 2% is shared with the people who showed up.
How every tournament result is hashed into a Merkle tree, committed to Solana, and made independently verifiable by anyone.
A direct, evidence-based answer to whether a skill-based trading tournament is gambling — explained through the scoring design.
How a skill-based trading tournament compares with a prop firm challenge — cost structure, time commitment, and what each one actually measures.
How a skill-based trading tournament compares with trading your own money on an exchange — bounded risk, asymmetric reward, and why a market crash does not break your plan.
How TradeLab lets you practise trading free on hidden-outcome historical scenarios, and how each session builds your skill rating.
How the Sivex Rating works — TradeLab practice sets your starting rating, tournaments are how you climb — why it is worth climbing, and what a high rating unlocks as the platform grows.
How the Rating Drop works — a cash pool split every two weeks among the top of the Sivex Rating, who qualifies, how the banded payouts work, and why the pool only goes up.
How the Sivex Play referral program works — 15 days of Sivex Pass for the trader you bring, a freeroll pass for both of you on their first deposit, a Shield per qualified referral, and for creators 2% of what their players deposit plus a per-player bounty, in Free Cash.
A plain-language guide to the Sivex Pass — the Run, the Table and the Sivex Playdesk, what else the Pass carries, how billing works against your wallet, what happens at renewal, and how to cancel.
The answer-first guide to trading tournaments — what they are, every format that exists (exchange contests, demo contests, fantasy apps, skill tournaments), how prize pools work, and what separates skill-based scoring from gambling.
Why most trading-competition entrants blow up, the scoring math that actually decides rankings, and the risk-discipline playbook that wins skill-scored tournaments.
Every kind of crypto trading competition compared — exchange volume contests, demo contests, and skill tournaments — and why identical capital with risk-adjusted scoring levels the field.
Where to compete on gold, silver, and crude oil — how commodity trading contests work, the market hours that shape them, and why XAU is a competition staple.
An honest map of the alternatives to FTMO — other prop firms, free broker contests, and skill-based trading tournaments — with the trade-offs of each model spelled out.
The consistency rules, drawdown technicalities, and discretionary reviews that commonly sit between a passed challenge and a paid trader — and what a no-review payout model looks like.
The 2026 field guide to paper trading competitions — free brand-funded contests, broker arenas, and entry-fee skill tournaments — and how prize density differs across them.
How fantasy stock-picking apps differ from live trading tournaments — drafting a portfolio is not trading, and only one of the two scores execution and risk management.
Plain-language definitions of every term used across Sivex Play tournaments, scoring, TradeLab, and rewards.