Actually it was the opposite. For the first five days, only members on the winning team got free games + extra cards. People saw that this would cause one team to continuously steamroll the other teams because one team would have more resources than the others to gain points, and people could buy into the winning team with team switchers and help them out. This caused people to rig the system behind the scenes (starting after day 2) so all teams could win an equal number of times for the benefit of the people too poor to buy team switchers to the winning team.

That all changed after day five, from that point onwards teams in second and third places also got minor prizes, and everything fell apart with the behind the scenes rigging. Red team steamrolled the rest of the days (except for one day they gave to pink team to say thanks for your loyalty) because of how the system enable steamrolling. If you watched the point totals for those last days, it wasn't even close between the teams, save for the final day when Valve obviously fudged the numbers to make it look like all the teams were all tied.

And as a blue team member who trusted that everyone was going to get a fair shot (and was too poor to buy into the red team) this was the worst Steam sale. The results for the blue team basically said "you guys did the worst, and it wasn't because the other teams were sabotaging you either." That sale made me start buying games from GoG just because of how salty I was.