Every tournament is two games happening at once:

the visible one — the leaderboard

the hidden one — your X growth

The first pays you once. The second compounds forever.
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Creators without enough influence who treat tournaments as isolated prize hunts stay stuck in the middle.
Creators who treat tournaments as long-term distribution engines end up ranking higher and walking away with a stronger brand.
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Your job is simple: you grow first, you rank second.

This playbook gives you a rough outline you can follow.

Most new creators make the same mistake: they jump into every tournament because it feels productive but also comes with the illusion of potential rewards.
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It is NOT.

When you spread yourself across too many tournaments:

And that’s not the end of the damage:

This is why picking the right tournament matters more than joining many.
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Choose tournaments that match:

With these, your content will come across as effortless.
Effortless content always beats forced texts and people see that on the timeline.

Before you create a single post, check four things:
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​a. Rewards

Are they worth your time? Check:

b. leaderboard status

Look at the list.

c. your opportunity cost

What will you not be doing while chasing this?
Each day has 24h and growth requires intentional allocation and even if you are not always right, in time you become better at this.

This napkin math saves you from losing time and energy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the project, you need a research sprint.
This is non-negotiable.

Your baseline includes:

If you skip this, it shows instantly.
Shallow understanding leaks through your first sentence, and the TL punishes it

and this is done quietly, by labelling you as just another "InfoFi slopper" (and perhaps even muting you).
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If something is unclear, ask in the community only after doing the groundwork.

This will also give your the chance to connect with the members in there and even some team members, which is always useful and important.
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Your depth determines your ceiling.

Now you have your baseline.
This is your blank canvas.
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If you don't have your signature format by now, you can experiment with the ones that feel natural to you.
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Here are some non-restrictive examples you can use based on your current level of influence and taste:

Use anything you want.
These simply reflect what tends to work at each influence level.

Inside a tournament, every post should accomplish at least one of these:

If a post does none of these, it’s filler.
Filler doesn’t rank.
Filler doesn’t grow.
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If you have a unique skill (visual design, sleuthing, video editing, humor, screenshots-as-proof), combine it with the list above.
It multiplies your impact.

This is how you become “that guy” for the project.

You don’t need months of mastery.

Chances are you don't have them anyways.
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Tournaments compress time because they squeeze tons of information into short windows, most people can’t keep up.
If you show up consistently, you become the reference point during the tournament.

Being "that guy" in a tournament means:

That’s enough.
Consistency and clarity is all you need in compressed timeframes.

Look for:

Your job is to turn available information into digestible insight (not regurgitate docs).

Good creators pick one part of the storyline and own it.

By now, people immediately detect LLM-rewritten copy from the website vs real understanding and unique framing.

Show that you actually thought:

Real work signals authenticity and it carries reach.

You will destroy your distribution by doing the wrong things:

If you wouldn’t enjoy scrolling your own profile, others won’t either.

Your profile needs to look like someone worth following after the tournament ends (not a temporary mercenary).

The creator who wins is not the one who posts the most.
As of now, most algorithms either apply diminishing returns or cap or even ban this behavior.
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The creator who wins is the one whose posts travel on X, one who has distribution.

Every tournament is a chance to:

influence → reach → leaderboard position
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not the other way around
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Also, what worked in the past in terms of spamming and inorganic content boosting ranking high does not work now and most of these loopholes will be covered in the future.

Most creators fall off.
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They start strong, burn out in 3 days, produce low-quality filler, and wonder why they didn’t win.
That is not the work ethics content creation demands.

The ones who succeed:

If you can’t commit, you can’t compete.

Take a snapshot of your account before and after and compare three things:

If these numbers move upwards, the tournament compounded your influence.
If they don’t, your approach needs a reset.

There is a myth circulating CT: "you cannot grow through InfoFi"
reality is that you cannot grow when you play the game wrong.
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This workflow aims to makes you a more intentional creator and to avoid all the obvious traps that tank other creator's credibility and make them disposable.

Choose the right tournament → evaluate the cost → build your baseline → pick your formats → remove friction → own a slice of the story → avoid low-quality spam → stay consistent → measure your growth

That’s only a model to start until you develop your own.

Give it a go and always aim at winning both games — the tournament and your long-term X growth.