Hungrybox Announces The Return of The Coinbox Tournaments

The biggest online tournament series is coming back. That was the briefest possible summary of the recent announcement from the "Hungrybox Direct," where the man himself has revealed the details behind the big comeback.

If you're not familiar, The Coinbox tournament series was a weekly event hosted by Team Liquid and powered by Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform. It quickly became the largest online tournament, but had to be cut short in 2024, at least partially thanks to Nintendo's intervention in how Smash tournaments have to be organized.

Now, almost a year later, it's coming back without any sort of crypto sponsorship, and some rather big changes too.

While base tournaments will be funded by Hungrybox himself, they also have a patron system in place, or rather the "whale" system. Those who subscribe for 10 USD a month will not only contribute to the bonus prize pools, but also get to make decisions for several of the events, of which there will be four kinds:

1. First week of every month is a vanilla SSBU tournament that everyone is familiar with.
2. Second week is going to be a Melee tournament, the undying classic.
3. Third week is where whales come in with the votes on the Player's Choice tournament. Each week, they will get to decide which 4 characters will be banned.
4. Fourth week is the variety game tournament. If people want, they can vote for more Smash, but it seems like absolutely anything goes.

The last cherry on top is a special "Thug Finals" match at the end of each tournament. This is where whales can ensure that any player of their choice gets to have a go at the winner of that week's tournament.

This is certainly quite a fresh way to run a tournament, and between Hungrybox's personal support and the contributions from Metafy, it might get some real legs on it. However, esports are notoriously unreliable, and with such generous weekly prize pools, it will be interesting to see how the organizers will navigate the costs of running the events.