surprised the world doesn't already have a tournament in place
Well, the world here has a pattern of things conveniently missing for MC to invent them (board games, fictional prose, banks, etc). It isn't an uncommon cliche, but iirc this story actually lampshades it by blaming it on bad writers of the original game, i.e. supposedly their world building was lazy, so when it became real it is still full of hard to explain holes in areas not explicitly featured in the game, or something like that. Like, for example some time later it turns out they have
modern pianos, but for no good reason
only very simple music to play on them.
