**This is a sponsored post and Kapitall comped my buy in for this tournament. But I am freaking in love with the Magic K Ball. With the what? Read on.**

Do you love poker AND the stock markets? Because I’ve found a site for you.

Kapitall lets you play the stock market before playing the stock market. For a small “buy in” to their tournaments, you have a chance at winning a prize by being the player with the stocks with the biggest gains during the timeframe of the tournament.

I just played in the High Roller Tournament this weekend and for a $5 buy in, the prizes were $200 for 1st place down to $25 for 5th place, with 37 of us competing for the prize.

How It Works

When you sign up at Kapitall, it’ll take you to a dashboard with a stock ticker along the bottom and little squares with the current tournaments in the middle of the page. When I first logged in, it offered me a chance to join the Market Masters tournament and that was the default tournament sitting in the middle of my log in page.

To check out other tournaments, click on the upper right hand button that says KStore.

In the KStore, you can select Portfolios, which are just for you to practice on, and Market Masters, which are competing games against other people with prizes.

Once you select your Market Master tournament, it will show up on your homepage and you can enter it by double clicking.

From there you buy and sell by going up to the Trade Now drop down menu. It’ll let you search for stocks and put in your orders.

There’s a page where you can check out your holdings.

Personally, I liked the Summary page better. Even though I didn’t exactly kick butt on the leaderboard, I did get a weird thrill out of beating the S&P 500.

Koins

The Kapitall world runs on Koins. They’re what your real money turns into to fund your buys ins and anything else you want to buy on the site, but you can also earn them without whipping out your credit card.

I got a few Koins daily for just logging in and poking around the site. I also got a few Koins each time I leveled up. There’s a little star meter next to your profile picture in the corner and as you spend more time getting to know the site, it increases and gets you closer to leveling up.

My favorite way to make new Koins appear is the Magic K Ball and the Space Investors game. These are two free games that appear in the lower right hand corner of your dashboard and are hard to miss. They’re a lot of fun!

What I Learned

I didn’t really expect to learn a lot about the stock market in a one week trading game, but it turns out I did.

Keep in mind, I absolutely don’t advocate that you make trading a “game” with your long term investments – set ‘em and forget ‘em – except for a yearly or bi-yearly rebalancing.

However, if you want a chance at making any money over the course of one week, that system doesn’t really work. I banked heavily on picking stocks that were down hoping at least one would come back.

Suffice to say, this was not a good method.

In the long run, probably not a problem. I even picked a few stocks I already own and despite being very good to me over the last 10 years, they totally screwed me in this week long game (I’m looking at you, Exxon).

I also learned to use your extra tools and use them early. The people who killed it on the leaderboards got boosts early in the game and applied them right away, giving them an extra few days to rack up the points from those boosts.

Just like in life, the earlier you figure out the personal finance game, the better!

The biggest thing I learned this week was watching my daily gains fluctuate with the market. The “money” invested in this tournament was $100,000. It was not uncommon for me to be up or down $100 a day.

$100 is a little less than I make now.

For some reason, this really made it hit home that I can absolutely save up enough for retirement. I know $100,000 isn’t nearly enough, but just seeing what a huge difference $100,000 can make on how quickly your investments will start to increase vs the $30,000 I’ve got invested now was pretty awesome.

Of course, sometimes the also drop like a rock. I noticed that a few days too.

cough, cough, Verizon.

Ready to Play For Real

If you’ve gotten comfortable with stocks by playing the tournaments and practice portfolios on Kapitall, they are also a brokerage platform. You can really invest with them.

On the homepage, in the upper left hand corner, you’ll see the little briefcase that says Open Account.  They’ve teamed up with Apex to help host your account. You can also access advisors to help you navigate the process through the Chat with Kapitall option across the top of the screen.

How I Did

So I bet you’re all wondering how I did?

Nailed it!

J/K – 14th Place

But I wasn’t last and for a while there… that was my only goal.

And you know what? 1st Place or 37th, as long as you’re investing smart, it doesn’t matter if you’re the rabbit or the tortoise, you’ll still make it to your goal in the end.

Are you ready to play? Head over to Kapitall and get your game on!