Requiring upvotes to play = possible legal issues for the site owner.

And honestly, even if we required all players who play to upvote, there are not a lot of players in our league who have an upvote worth more than a few cents.

So the issue is, we need to attract players who have larger Steem accounts. =)

But people with larger Steem accounts don't need a few SBD from a freeroll poker site. #catch22

So, if we could just get a few to upvote daily, we'd be OK most likely. But I'd rather they also play.

Regarding some of your other thoughts...

Those things can be easily done with the solution I proposed a few times to the hosts over the last month. You guys would be the ones choosing who could play in your tourney's with your own custom inter-league type system, if you wanted, or just use the current player pool.

I've already created the tool so you all can add your own tourneys, get emailed the results and got a second batch payment tool made to give you all a few options. It's all fairly simple to use once you learn how to do it the first time.

All that would need to be done would be to add in the player selection mod and it's ready to fly and that likely wouldn't take long at all to get knocked out.

Going this route also opens up possibilities for the site to expand into other cryptocurrencies as well as a front end play chip site for fiat that could possibly support itself.