How a Lobby Works

A lobby is one table. Its host sets the buy-in a seat costs when they open it, and half of every buy-in stays on the table as the pot. The buy-in cannot change while anyone is sitting at the table. Everything below follows from that.

For now, the Rising Tide team opens the tables. Hosting your own is coming. You take a seat; you never have to open a table to play.

The buy-in

A seat costs the buy-in, paid in sats when you take it. Two seats make a match. The default a new lobby proposes is 1,000 sats; the host can set it higher or lower before opening.

Each buy-in splits the moment it lands:

• Half stays in the lobby as the pot for this match, so a 1,000-sat buy-in puts 500 sats in the pot.
• The rest pays the table. Most of it pays the host, and it is theirs to keep whoever wins: a busy lobby pays its host on every seat. At a table opened today, part of it also pays the artist who drew the game's trophy.

Where each share goes is fixed when the lobby opens, and what a seat costs is locked from the moment the first seat is taken. Nobody - the host included - can change either while someone is sitting at the table.

A host can take a seat at their own table. Their buy-in then skips their own share - it would only be paid back to them, so it never leaves their wallet.

Leaving a seat

Until the match starts, a seat is not a commitment. Leave it, and your pot share comes back to you. The host's part and the artist's part were paid when you sat down and stay paid. If you held the first seat, the other player moves up into it.

Once both seats are taken, either player starts the match, and from then on the seats are locked until it ends.

What the host pays

Opening a lobby costs a little, the way publishing anything on the protocol does - a small fee in the marketplace's own token, explained on What things cost, and what you earn. The lobby then stands for as many matches as people want to play at it; the host does not pay again per match.

The pot

The pot is the two halves, one buy-in in all. A bomb adds nothing to it (below; the full story is on Watching and Bombing). When a match ends in a win, the winner claims the pot - it moves straight from the lobby to the winner's own address. The lobby's contract decides where the pot goes, and it has no way to send it anywhere else.

The claim also hands the match to the winner as a numbered edition - the trophy - permanent like any edition.

The bomb

A host can open a Tic-Tac-Boom lobby with bombs. A bomb is the crowd's move, not a player's: anyone watching the match - anyone signed in who is not one of the two players - can blow one mark off the board while the match is on, three bombs per match by default. The two players cannot; the boom belongs to the audience. A bomb costs no sats: whoever throws it pays only the small charge every move pays to be sent, and nothing reaches the pot or pays the table. The board names who threw each one. Drop Four tables have no bombs; a disc pulled out of a column would leave a hole the board cannot hold.

The draw

A full board with no line is a draw. Each player claims half the pot - their own half of the buy-in back. The host's part of every buy-in was paid at the seat and stays paid; a draw returns the pot, not the buy-in. A match stalls when nobody has moved for 144 Bitcoin blocks, about a day. The host can then close it as a draw, and the same claim applies. A host who is seated in the match is a player, and cannot close it.

Your record

Every match you play counts: played, won, drawn, lost, hosted, and the pots you have claimed. Each game shows your record from its own screen, and the ladder reads it too: your first match and your first won pot are achievements.