The Five Challenge Templates, Walked Through

The challenge wizard opens on five templates. They exist because the numbers interact: the ticket price implies an audience, the audience implies a volume band, the volume band implies a duration, and the number of seats implies how many places should pay. Get one of those wrong by an order of magnitude and the challenge either does not fill or is not worth entering.

Each template is a set of defaults with those relationships already coherent. Everything in them is editable afterwards. Here is what each one actually contains and the situation it is built for.

The five, side by side

Two columns deserve a note before we go template by template.

The volume band is two different mechanisms. The floor is an eligibility gate: trade less than it across your window and you are not in the prize split, however well you scored. The ceiling is a pro-rating ceiling, not a hard stop: you can keep trading above it, but each fill's realized PnL is scaled by the fraction of that fill still fitting under your remaining cap, and unrealized PnL on open positions is pro-rated the same way. Volume brackets explained works through the arithmetic.

The duration is a suggestion, not a constraint. You set a real start and end. The template just prefills a window that matches the band — you cannot reasonably ask for $100k of volume in an hour.

Micro Arena — $10, small accounts, one day

The cheapest of the preset templates and the one most likely to fill. A $10 ticket is below the threshold at which people deliberate, and a $10k–$25k band means a trader with a few thousand dollars of margin can clear the floor comfortably and hit the ceiling if they push.

Fifty seats at $10 is a $500 gross pool if it fills, so the prize is not the draw — the format is. Use it when you want turnout, when your audience is retail, or when the point is to get twenty people to place their first competitive trade rather than to hand out money.

The 50/30/20 split concentrates everything in three places. Over fifty entrants that is a 6% chance of cashing, which is thin. If you expect a full room, consider swapping to a percentage-of-field split so the pool pays deeper.

Mid Stakes — $50, active traders, three days

The most balanced template, and the one to reach for if you are not sure. A $50 ticket filters out drive-by entries without excluding anyone serious. The $25k–$100k band assumes a trader who is genuinely active — a four-figure account turning over several times, or a five-figure account trading normally.

Seventy-two hours is the meaningful change from Micro Arena. A three-day window rewards consistency over a single lucky trade, gives late promotion time to work, and makes the flat-start rule painless: everybody finds a moment to be flat in three days.

It is also the only template that pays five places, 40/25/15/12/8. Over fifty seats that is a 10% cash rate — still concentrated, but enough that finishing fourth is worth trading for.

Whale Pit — $250, size, a full week

Twenty seats, a $250 ticket, and a $100k–$500k band. This is a different sport, and the numbers say so: the floor alone excludes anyone not moving six figures of notional in a week.

The seven-day window is doing real work here. Large accounts do not turn over $100k of notional in an afternoon without changing how they trade, and a short window would make the floor a leverage contest rather than a volume one. The small field is deliberate too — with twenty seats, 50/30/20 is a 15% cash rate, which is generous by challenge standards and appropriate when the ticket is $250.

Use it for a private room of traders who already know each other, or as the top tier of a ladder where Micro and Mid Stakes are the entry rungs. Do not use it to try to fill a public room from cold: twenty people willing to post $250 and $100k of volume is a high bar, and a Whale Pit that does not fill is worse than a Mid Stakes that does.

1v1 Duel — $100, two players, winner takes all

Two seats, no volume floor, no volume ceiling, 24 hours, one payout.

The absence of a cap is the interesting part. Every other template caps volume to stop a large account simply out-sizing the field. With two players there is nobody to protect: whatever asymmetry exists between the two of them is the contest, and both agreed to it. A cap would only add an arbitrary rule to a fight both parties chose.

Winner-takes-all is the same logic. Splitting a two-player pot is not a competition, it is a fee.

This is the format for creator-versus-creator content, for settling an argument in a group chat, or for a series of matches with a running record. KOL vs KOL trading duels covers how to run one as content, including the honest caveat that 24 hours of PnL between two traders is mostly variance.

Custom — the escape hatch

A $25 ticket, no volume floor, a $50k ceiling, unlimited seats, 24 hours, 50/30/20. It exists so you can start from something sane and change everything.

The defaults are chosen to be harmless rather than opinionated: no floor means nobody is excluded for trading too little, a $50k ceiling still stops a whale running away with it, and unlimited seats means the challenge never turns anyone away. If you know exactly what you want, start here. If you do not, start from one of the four above and edit.

Choosing between them

The decision is almost always about the room, not the prize:

• Who is in your audience? Match the volume band to the accounts they actually have. A band your audience cannot clear produces a challenge where nobody is eligible at settlement.
• How many will show up? Small expected field, fixed ranks. Unknown field, percentage-of-field buckets — one config that pays sensibly whether twelve or five hundred enter.
• How long can you keep attention? 24 hours is promotable in a single post. Seven days needs something to say on day four.
• What is the ticket really for? At $10 it is a commitment device. At $250 it is the prize pool. Those want different challenges.

Everything else — re-buys, late joining, private visibility, minimum participants to start, sponsored mode — is orthogonal to the template and can be layered on top of any of them. Re-buys in particular pair well with short windows: see challenge re-buys explained.

The short version

Micro Arena for turnout, Mid Stakes for a real contest, Whale Pit for size, 1v1 Duel for content, Custom when you already know. The templates are five coherent starting points, not five products — the volume band is the decision that matters most, and it is the one to revisit first.

Create a challenge to see them prefilled, or read how to run a crypto PnL challenge for the settings the templates do not cover.