The Thinking Man's Approach to Tontine

A lot has been written about the all-or-nothing stakes of Tontine. Certainly, it's a monumental risk to give up your entire life savings. But it seems to be a manageable risk, if you look at it the right way. By requiring your life savings, Tontine is essentially asking you for a "buy in" to a $10 million tournament. It's common in Poker tournaments for players to sell a percentage of their potential winnings to a sponsor to cover these buy ins -- why not in Tontine?

This is how I would play, to ensure that if I didn't win, I wasn't going home to nothing. Odds of 15:1 are not stratospheric. I would think that, selling him or herself the right way, a contestant could get as much as $100,000 for a 10% cut of potential winnings. That's a 1000% return on a sponsor's money, and $100,000 waiting for the contestant in case they didn't return home with the prize.

Of course, this would have to be structured in such a way that the sponsor's money was transfered post-competition, so it wouldn't be thrown into the pot with the rest of the contestant's assets.