The Cyberathelete Professional League's upcoming "Extreme Winter Championship" tournament in Dallas, Texas has been confirmed as the largest gaming tournament ever staged. This is solely because of the sheer size of the cash prize confirmed for the tournament: 1 million dollars. There's a catch though. As 1UP.com reveals, "the million dollar payout is not actually a 'winner-take-all' award.'

However, the open-to-all Halo 3 tournament will reward its winner (the Xbox Halo 3 World Champion) a substantial amount of cash nonetheless: $250.000. That's a quarter of a million dollars for those who know what a frag is but never made it to second grade maths. The rest of the money, $750,000, is going to be divvied in different ways "between the next 64 people in line," the same source confirms.

Also, the competition doesn't require any previous experience with tournaments of the sort, nor does it feature qualification rounds, so rest assured, everyone can get their chance to win the big bucks. Everyone that can spare at least $275 that is. Yes, so we forgot to mention this little detail earlier in the article... And we said "at least" because you'll be charged with $475 for a standard registration, while the $275 charge is for those who manage to register before November 2nd.

So if you know you have steady thumbs, cat-like reflexes and experience with first-person shooters (not that it's required, as mentioned above) and of course if you have the registration cash, there's no reason why you shouldn't get on board with some of the world's most fierce online FPS gamers. And yes, you can bet your a*s that the who's who of the genre will be there ready to kick your a*s out of the tournament and have you crying the whole trip back home, where you'll be getting more s**t from the wife (or mom), for spending half a month's salary on something that you thought was your ticket to living the high-life.

Or you can be the undiscovered talent that wins the cash and gets applauded. You never know. Here's CPL's official Winter Championships website.