The rumour that nearly sank Leo Xtreme

In June 2025 my Leo Club was a few weeks away from its first big event, and nobody wanted to come. We had planned an eSports tournament, Free Fire and BGMI, ₹500 a player, with a ₹10,000 prize for the winning team and the profit going to food drives. We had a venue, a poster and a registration form. What we didn't have was registrations.

I did what seemed obvious. I called more than a hundred players in and around Siliguri, one by one, and explained what the event was, who was running it and where the money was going. Most of them said no. A few days later I found out why: someone had been telling people the tournament was a scam.

At the time this felt like bad luck. Looking back, I think it was an economics problem, and a fairly well-known one.

A market with one side in the dark

Registering for a tournament is a small purchase. A player pays ₹500 now in exchange for a promise: that the event will happen, that it will be run fairly, and that the prize will be paid. The player can't check any of that in advance. We knew the event was real; they didn't.

Economists call this asymmetric information. George Akerlof's paper on the market for “lemons”¹ showed what it does to a used-car market: if buyers can't tell good cars from bad ones, they will only pay a price that reflects the average risk, owners of good cars won't sell at that price, and the market can shrink until hardly anything trades. We weren't selling cars, but the logic carried over. A player who can't tell a real tournament from a fake one treats every unknown organiser as a possible fake.

The rumour didn't have to convince anyone. It only had to add a little doubt. If a player thinks there is even a one-in-five chance of losing ₹500 and a wasted Saturday, the easy decision is to skip it and play online at home for free. And these were squads of four, so one doubtful teammate was enough to keep a whole team out.

It also fed on itself. An empty registration list is a signal too. Every player who held back made the event look less real to the next one, which is a big part of why the numbers stalled rather than just grew slowly.

Why a hundred phone calls didn't work

My calls were sincere, but from the player's side they carried almost no information. Think about what a scammer would have done in my place: exactly the same thing. He would also call people, sound confident and promise that the prize was real. Because the message costs the same whether the event is real or fake, hearing it shouldn't change anyone's mind. Economists call this cheap talk.

More calls didn't work, because anyone running a scam would have made the same calls.

That was the uncomfortable part. Working harder at reassurance was never going to fix a problem that reassurance couldn't solve.

Why one company name did

I stepped back for two days and asked my dad. His suggestion was to put our family company's name, L Fusion, behind the event. It has been doing business in Siliguri since 1992.

That changed the arithmetic for the player. A scammer can't borrow thirty years of local reputation, and a real business that lends its name to a fake tournament has something to lose: clients, suppliers and standing in a small city where people talk. The name was a signal that would have been expensive to send if the event were fake. That is the idea behind Michael Spence's work on signalling:² a signal is believable when it costs the dishonest more to send than the honest.

Free Fire teams started signing up. Nothing about the event itself had changed. What changed was that players now had a reason to believe it that didn't depend on taking our word for it.

What didn't recover

BGMI never picked up. After another week with no teams, I cancelled that half of the tournament. I'm still not completely sure why one game recovered and the other didn't. My best guess is that by then the BGMI players had already made other plans, and that the BGMI scene around us was smaller, so the signal reached fewer people. A fix that works can still arrive too late for part of the market.

What I'd do differently

I'd start with credibility instead of trying to repair it. Before asking anyone for money, show the things a fake event couldn't easily show: the venue agreement, the sponsors' names, the backing organisation, and a running count of registered teams. Each of those is a costly signal of its own.

The event did happen on 28 June 2025. It turned a profit, the winning team took home ₹10,000, and almost all of the rest went on grain, flour and salt for our food drives. But the thing I took away is about trust, not eSports. Being confident is not the same as being believed. The people who have to decide whether to trust you are asking a different question: what would it cost you if you were lying?