The SteemSports team thanks the Steem community for the support of our project and hope you are enjoying the games so far!

Just a quick update on a few things we are working on:

Payments Application

You may have seen @furion's post about the payment app he developed for the project, so far it is going well and we have paid all historical games up to date.

We will endeavour to pay out twice per week, mostly on a Monday and Thursday, but this may vary depending on our schedules and how many games have been posted.

The app is a fully dockerised app which we are constantly developing to meet the needs of SteemSports, recently we added some modifications to the entry requirements, we noticed users trying to game the system with low vote weights like 1% and such, even a 0% vote was noticed, not only on the main post but on the comment as well, so effectively those users were leaching rewards from the rest of the participants due to the fact that rewards are in equal shares mode.

We have introduced a vote weight requirement which has been in force for a few games already, whale accounts over 100 000 SP need to vote a minimum of 10% on either the main post or the winning comment and smaller accounts with less than 100K SP need to vote 50% minimum.

Steemsports.com website

We are currently planning a frontend for SteemSports, we have registered steemsports.com and plan to build a sports betting platform which offers Free Bet and Live Bet options for high stakes players, "live bets" will be initially placed in Steem Dollars and later on other digital asset wallets, which may be integrated as well to bring together the blockchain communities.

The site will also incorporate sports and gaming ad revenue, which will be an easy demographic for advertisers to target, because even though users mostly are anonymous, the commonality is that they all will be interested in sports and games.

Advertising will be payable in Steem to help create further demand and drive up the Steem price.

Our technical lead @furion will be working on the functionality of the website, but we need to crowdfund to be able to hire designers such as @cass or any other willing and able designer should @cass not be available.

The proceeds of this post will go mainly towards crowdfunding for the front-end development.

Live Bet Beta Test

@furion has been hard at work with some more mods for our app which will be incorporated in steemsports.com, we need to test it, so tomorrow we will launch a "live bet" game which will work as follows:

Participants need only transfer Steem Dollars to the steemsports account with the name of the winning outcome in the memo. All funds will be added to the pool with no rake or deductions on this trial run, the players who bet on the winning outcome will then receive back a winning percentage based on their participation amount in the stake. So the more you bet, the more you win!

The post rewards won't form part of the bet this time as we are trying to focus on the real bet test, any post rewards on the "live bet" game will go towards the development of steemsports.com and will be much appreciated, it will also aid in setting the post to trending and gain visibility for the "live bet" test.

Statistics

We put statistics on hold until we sorted out our payment issues, the stats script worked off the Steem Power payouts made so wasn't possible to split up the stats into weekly stats due to the payouts being done recently in a bulk payment. We will have to include all those winners in one stats post, which we hope to do in the coming week, some great news also, Gridcoin is currently taking a vote to rain down Gridcoin (GRC) on the top 20 SteemSports weekly stats winners.

The vote will be finallised on Monday the 7th of November 2016 and below are the results of the vote can be seen along with @cm-steem's public statement on Beyond Bitcoin. Please support @cm-steem and @gridcoinman on Steemit, they are really genuine guys.

@cm-steem announcing Gridcoin / SteemSports collab on Beyond Bitcoin

Thanking you for your assistance and support,

For and on behalf of, the SteemSports Team

Don't forget to vote thecryptodrive witness ...I'm only 2 places away from top 40!