Japan's tournament scene is dominated by FX-broker demo contests. Gaitame.com's バーチャルFX runs quarterly (currently 第57回), and moomoo×JPX runs the major annual stock paper-trading contest. JFSA inducement rules limit live-money rank contests on regulated brokers, so offshore platforms (FXGT, XMTrading, Fintokei prop) carry most of the cash-prize action with grey-zone disclaimers. Japanese crypto exchanges (bitFlyer, Coincheck, GMO Coin) run only キャンペーン deposit lotteries, not rank tournaments.
South Korea has the densest broker-tournament market in Asia. Most volume is on stock brokers — KB증권 투자마스터즈 with a ₩315M annual pool, Kiwoom 영웅전 around ₩1.3B, 한국투자증권's monthly 한투배틀 with gold prizes — and bi-monthly Bithumb Trading King seasons up to ₩905M on the crypto side. Almost all require Korean-resident KYC and 본인인증 phone verification.
Scoring weights live-tournament count 1× and verified traders 2×. Updated every 24h from the live catalog.
Explore other angles
How is the "Japan vs South Korea" leader picked?
The verdict is scored deterministically: live tournament count carries 1× weight and verified traders carry 2× weight. The higher total wins; a tie is called out explicitly. Both inputs update from the live catalog every 24 hours — no editorial thumb on the scale.
Can I enter a Japan tournament from South Korea (and vice versa)?
Depends on the specific tournament's geo-block rules. Every tournament we catalog has a geo_blocked_countries list — the counts above already exclude tournaments blocked to residents. Open a specific tournament page to confirm requirements (KYC, deposit, residency proof) before entering from a non-listed country.
Where do the "verified traders" numbers come from?
A trader is marked verified when they carry an independently-audited performance record — typically a broker-audited annual return (Robbins World Cup, U.S. Investing Championship), a third-party track-record verification service, or a fully-transparent on-chain record. Self-reported returns don't qualify.
Why not include prize-pool totals in the score?
Prize-pool sums are dominated by 1-2 outlier events (a single $10M tournament swamps 20 real-money contests). Tournament count + verified traders reflect the underlying scene depth better. We show prize pools alongside the top-3 tournaments in each country's card for transparency.
How often is this page updated?
Cache TTL is 24 hours; the page rebuilds on the next request after that. Admin changes to specific tournaments trigger targeted revalidation of the related country pages — if those flow into this battle, expect near-immediate freshness on the moved rows.