Which are the most competetive board games?

[OwnerOfTheIronThrone]

As the title says. The most competetive ones I know of are chess, Go, scrabble. But are there any newer and more random yet still with a competetive environment? I often hear of Terraforming Mars tournaments and I have played more extremly good TM then in any other game (excluding the "classical" ones).

And which games do you think fit best tournament style play?

[Jeronimon]

I think that there are a lot, but I will tell you about the one I know most of Memoir'44.


The Memoir'44 community organizes tournaments online and in real life.
Some here on BGA one I know of on Vassal.

In real Life two days:
French Open 27 28 April 2024
US Open 8&9 June 2024
UK Open 28 29 september 2024
Belgian Open 9&10 November 2024
Dutch Open 2&3 March 2025

Smaller one day tournaments are run in Belgium and France and UK more often but If I list those I will forget some of them so I am not risking that.

[ErikLevin]

Do we count Poker? WSOP has tens of millions of USD in prize money.

Magic the Gathering has got to be the biggest among modern games? And one of the biggest period? The yearly World Championship has a $1 million prize pool, there's four Pro Tour tournaments with a couple hundred thousand each every year, and thousands of lesser and local tournaments all the time.
(I actually thought Pokémon TCG or Yu-Gi-Oh could be bigger, but it seems like that is not the case.)

I know very little of how Chess works but I'm reading that the World Championship of 2023 had a €2 million prize pool. I'm not sure how many other competitive/professional Chess things there are and what the sum of money involved is for that. On par with Magic, perhaps more? Surely far away from Poker.

Scrabble is very tiny by comparison. Not sure about Go.