Skool Games Review: Is Alex Hormozi's Challenge Worth Entering?

If you are reading about the Skool Games, you have already decided a paid online community could be your business, or you are close to it. This page is for people who want the costs, the rules and the odds first.

The Skool Games is a free quarterly contest run by Skool, the community platform, with Alex Hormozi as partner: the 50 community owners with the highest monthly recurring revenue in their category win a trip to Los Angeles and an event with Hormozi. Entry is automatic for every Skool owner, but to place you need a paid Skool plan ($9 or $99 a month, no refunds) and paying members. The official rules limit prizes to residents of the US and Canada aged 21 and over, which excludes the UK and Australia.

What you get

There are two products here. The contest, described in Skool's official rules, and the platform you have to pay for to compete.

The contest. Seasons run quarterly: 1 January to 1 April, 1 April to 30 June, 1 July to 29 September and 1 October to 30 December, and "such periods recur annually". The Q4 2026 season was running when we checked. Communities are ranked by monthly recurring revenue in ten categories (All, Hobbies, Music, Money, Spirituality, Tech, Health, Sports, Self-improvement and Relationships), and the top five in each win. Prizes are a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, a hotel up to $2,000 a person, an event with the other winners and Hormozi, a tour of Skool's office and a physical award.

The community around it. Skoolers, Skool's free group for owners run by co-founder Sam Ovens, has training on growing a group, weekly news calls and live leaderboards for the Games. Hormozi and Ovens publish recordings of the quarterly events on YouTube.

The platform. A Skool group gives you a community feed, courses, a calendar for live calls, payments and an affiliate programme for your members, per its pricing page.

What it costs and the refund policy

Facts as of November 2026. Sources: the sales page, refund terms and course page.

• Entry: free, all Skool community owners are entered automatically
• Skool Hobby: $9 a month plus a 10% transaction fee
• Skool Pro: $99 a month plus a 2.9% transaction fee
• Both plans have a 14-day free trial

Prices as of November 2026, from The Skool Games's pricing page.

Hobby costs less per month, but its 10% transaction fee overtakes Pro's $90 higher price once members pay you about $1,270 a month, by our arithmetic from the two fees.

Skool's payment terms are plain: "No refunds will be provided for full or partial billing periods or for the non-use of the platform. ... TLDR: You can cancel anytime, but Skool doesn't issue refunds." When you cancel, access runs to the end of the billing period and the group is archived read-only.

The rules say purchase is "not necessary to participate", which is true of entry. Ranking needs revenue, and revenue needs a paid plan.

Who is behind it

Skool was founded in 2019 by Sam Ovens and Daniel Kang and is based in Los Angeles. Its about page says "Alex Hormozi partnered with Skool in 2024 to create The Skool Games". The contest sponsor in the rules is Skool.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and the rules name Hormozi as founder of Acquisition.com. The size of his stake in Skool has not been published; the "$100 million investment" figure repeated online has no primary source we could find. Ovens previously ran Consulting.com, which he sold to Iman Gadzhi in 2025. Hormozi's wider record is in our Alex Hormozi guru review.

Controversies and complaints

We found no lawsuit, regulator action or major-outlet investigation about the Skool Games as of 9 November 2026.

The rules carry the catches. Entrants must be legal residents of the 50 US states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico or Canada and at least 21. The excluded places include the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Singapore and Quebec. Disputes go to binding individual arbitration, with no class actions. The rules apply to seasons launched from 1 August 2025, so earlier seasons may have differed.

Critics of the format say the timing "pressures participants to convert free trials to paid plans mid-competition" and can "incentivize aggressive discounting that leads to higher churn later", in one 2026 analysis. Revenue that is discounted to place in a quarter has to be held afterwards.

What buyers report

Winners post publicly and happily; one creator wrote in June 2026 that "we have won every Skool games competition in 2026!" Complaints we found are about communities sold on Skool rather than the contest, such as a 2025 Reddit thread warning against fitness influencers selling programmes there. Trustpilot's page for skool.com showed a low score from a small number of reviews in a January 2026 snapshot, and we could not load it on 9 November 2026.

On odds: 50 winners a quarter means 200 a year across the whole platform. Skool's signup page claims "200k communities earning $1 billion per year", which averages about $5,000 a community a year by our arithmetic. That is a mean pulled up by the largest groups, so the typical group earns less.

Who it suits and who should skip it

It can suit a US or Canadian owner who already has an audience or a client list, plans to charge for a community anyway, and wants a deadline and a leaderboard to push the launch.

Skip it if you live outside the eligible countries and the prize is the reason you are signing up, if you have no audience to invite yet, or if you would cut your price to climb the board. The contest rewards revenue you already have the means to raise.

Cheaper ways to get the same result

The platform is the cheap part. The hard part is having people who want to join. An email list builds that for free and moves with you if you change platform. Our guides to course creation, selling on Whop and paid Substack compare the routes, and Skool vs Kajabi compares the platforms on fees.

If you want to build the audience before the community:

Newsletter Money Machine: pay what you want, from $0. A niche framework, setup guides for Beehiiv, ConvertKit and Substack, ten issue templates, a growth playbook for the first 1,000 subscribers and a sponsor outreach kit. Why so cheap? It is a digital download, written once and shared with everyone who wants it, so there is no live event, sales team or monthly platform to fund. We would rather you get a first result than buy another course. We are rooting for you. Who it is for: People who will write one issue a week, every week. If you want an audience without publishing, skip it.