Patent ID: RE44323

Claim:
A method for conducting one or more tournaments, comprising: identifying players requesting to join one of the tournaments, wherein each tournament of the tournaments includes a plurality of instances of a game for playing by each of the players identified, wherein for each of the players, at least one of the following (a) and (b) must be satisfied for the player to complete the one of the tournaments tournament : (a) a predetermined number of instances of the game must be played by the player in the one tournament ; (b) a predetermined amount of time must elapse between the a commencement of the one tournament and the a termination of the one tournament; for each tournament of the tournaments , the following steps (A1) through (A5) are performed: (A1) selecting the identified players to be included in the tournament; (A2) grouping the players into groups, wherein for each group, the players therein compete against one another in playing instances of the game for the tournament ; (A3) determining one or more winning players for each group; (A4) establishing a modified version of the game for the tournament by changing a rule defining a manipulation of one or more game playing cards or tokens of the game for the tournament while retaining another rule for of the game for the tournament ; and (A5) combining the winning players from different groups into one or more new groups for competing against one another in playing at least some instances of of the game, wherein each of the at least some instances is the modified version of the game ; wherein each of the players play in the one or more tournaments by communicating, via a corresponding networked device for the player, on a communications network for providing access to the game instances of the one or more tournaments; wherein for each of a plurality of the players (i) through (iii) following hold: (i) corresponding advertiser related data is combined with information for playing a corresponding one of the game instances for obtaining combined data, and the combined data is transmitted on the network to the player when the player plays the corresponding one game instance, wherein the corresponding advertising related data is for at least one advertiser; (ii) a presentation for the information for playing the corresponding one game instance, and a presentation for the corresponding advertiser related data are presented at a same time to the player on the corresponding networked device therefor; and (iii) at least a portion of data obtained from interactions by the player with the presentation for the information for playing the corresponding game instance provides the at least one advertiser with one of: (iii-a) information for an advertising related purpose different from playing the corresponding game instance, and (iii-b) information for determining an effectiveness of the presentation for the corresponding advertiser related data .