A system and method for conducting a wagering tournament game using real time or live action event content are disclosed. An embodiment includes: prompting a plurality of users at a plurality of geographically distributed user platforms to each submit a wager for entry as players into a real time live action wagering tournament game; dividing a plurality of players of the real time live action wagering tournament game into player groups; obtaining a set of real time or live event content via the data network while the plurality of players are playing the real time live action wagering tournament game; ranking each of the players in each player group based on their score; and enabling a pre-determined quantity of highest ranked players from each player group to advance to a next round.