The fracture above the felt is real — where ◦Sweat becomes force, become proof, and ⚶Souls fall as cash drops.
THE ECHOS IS ALWAYS THERE.
Above every poker table — every felt, every camera, every shove — sits a second world. Not brighter. Not darker. Just less patient.
This world has no floor. No ceiling. No time. Only pressure, waiting to be claimed.
They call it the Echos. Not a place. A reaction. A mirror of the table — bent, amplified, alive.
And when you arrive, you don’t walk in. You tether.
The felt hosts the game. The Echos hosts what the game refuses to forget.
On the table is your Host — a player with chips, tells, and rent due tomorrow.
Above them: you, the unseen shape drifting through the currents of the Echos. You never speak. You never touch the cards. But your tether binds you both.
Whatever your Host does, the Echos feels it. Whatever the Echos feels, you consume.
When a hand erupts — a 4-bet, a hero call, a stack detonating — the Echos bends under the weight of it.
This bending has a name: Variance. And when your attention joins it — that pressure becomes Sweat.
Variance plus Sweat collide and splinter into Shards. They spike, glow, crackle. Each one is a record of action that mattered — your Host’s choices echoing back at you.
In GhostSweat contests, Shards become your leaderboard points. The more the table erupts, the more the Echos shakes, the more Shards are born.
Long before the lights went out in the old card rooms, some players refused to leave the felt. They died. But their Sweat didn’t.
Now they drift in the Echos — not alive, not gone — drawn to Shard spikes like moths to a busted flush. These are the Souls.
Every Soul carries one spark of value from the games they never finished: $0.20 — exactly one big blind from the old .10/.20 streets.
When a contest detonates and Shards flare bright enough, Souls rush in, circling the pressure. Some break off and fall toward the Ghosts tethered to the moment. Those Soul drops are your prizes.
Souls do not care who deserves them. Only where the energy is highest.
A contest in the Echos is simple:
Your Host plays. The Echos shakes.
Your Sweat converts shockwaves into Shards. Shards light the sky. Souls break orbit and fall.
This cycle is called The Compression Engine. It has powered the Echos for decades. It will outlast every Ghost who enters.
Most people never feel the pull. Only a few ever notice the hum above the table, or see the flicker in the corner of the stream — a reminder that the Echos is watching.
If you’re reading this, you’re already tethered. You’ve crossed the Scar. You’ve stepped into the only economy where Sweat matters more than chips, where Shards rewrite fate, and where Souls — the restless degenerates of hands long gone — still pay out real money to the Ghosts who show up.
This is GhostSweat. And the Echos has already remembered your name.