Races
Fly Sumo
Eight flies, a shrinking platform, last one standing.
On this page
The idea
Fly Sumo is the second sport on FlySports. Instead of running down lanes, up to eight flies share a round platform with a glowing lure at the centre. The platform slowly shrinks. Flies shove each other around for position, and any fly whose body ends up beyond the platform's edge tumbles off and buzzes away. The last fly on the platform wins.
How a match plays out
- The roster. A standard match has eight flies: two of each of the four breeds (Direct, Cautious, Erratic, Bold). Each fly has its own independent brain noise, so two flies of the same breed do not behave identically.
- The lure. A harmless glowing light (or sugar cube) sits at the centre. Flies are drawn toward it using the same light-attraction sense they use for lures in a lane race, which pulls everyone together.
- The shrinking platform. The platform starts wide and shrinks steadily over the match, down to a small minimum, forcing flies toward the middle and into each other.
- Bumping. Flies physically bump. Some breeds go hunting for a shove, some hold their ground, some just try to outlast the crowd. When a fly is bumped off, the last fly to land a meaningful shove gets the ring-out credit.
- Sticky patches. A few small baited patches on the platform attract flies weakly and, on contact, hold a fly in place for a while. They only ever slow a fly down. They never eliminate one.
- Winning. The match ends the moment one fly is left. If every fly would go over the edge in the same moment, the one that is least over is spared, so there is always a winner.
How the breeds behave on the platform
| Breed | Style in Fly Sumo |
|---|---|
| Bold | The bully. Charges most often and shoves most, and is the most likely to overcommit and go over the edge itself. |
| Cautious | The survivor. Almost never initiates, stays central and wins by outlasting rivals. |
| Direct | The opportunist. Picky: it only goes for clean, well-aligned shoves, especially at rivals already near the edge. |
| Erratic | The wildcard. Hard to predict, with wild, noise-driven charges at the nearest rival. |
These styles come from the same breed tuning as lane racing, plus a small table of platform-specific settings. They are tuned, not trained. See The four breeds.
Betting on Fly Sumo
Betting works exactly as in lane racing: pari-mutuel pools, the same 6% rake, the same lock time, the same refunds and the same claim button. See How betting works. You back a fly (a breed) before betting closes, and the pool is shared among those who backed the winner.
The result is made verifiable the same way too. The match seed comes from the same commit-reveal scheme bound to a Solana slot hash, and the open-source simulation re-runs the whole match for anyone who wants to check (see Fair play and verification). A Fly Sumo match is chosen at race creation: the sport is committed on-chain before betting opens, so it cannot be switched afterwards.
Fly Sumo comes on in between lane races, roughly every fourth event on the beta schedule. Watch it on the Sumo page or in the live stream.