Looking to host tournaments for your local scene, but you’re not sure where to start?  Don’t worry, we’ve got your back! In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about planning a successful weekly or monthly tournament series. Thorough planning is essential to ensure your event runs smoothly and attendees have an enjoyable experience. You’ll want to make sure all bases are covered, which include:

Read on to learn more about each of these steps!

When planning an event, finding a venue should be at the top of your list. After all, if you don’t have a location to host a tournament, how will you host it? There are many different location options for a venue such as college buildings, local businesses, a community center, arcade store, hotel conference rooms, etc. You can host a tournament just about anywhere, but a few factors to keep in mind when shopping around are: venue size, electricity, internet, and amenities.

When determining what to set your venue fee to, you want to find the balance between a price that’s reasonable for your attendees, but also beneficial for you. Taking into account the number of attendees you’re expecting, do the math to figure out how much you need to charge.

For example, if the total costs for your event are $300, and you expect 50 attendees, you’ll need to charge at least $6 per person to exactly break even. Of course, you’ll want to charge a little extra so you can make a profit, but also as a safety net in case you don’t get exactly 50 attendees.

For tournaments where people will be pre-registering, it’s good to have venue fee tiers to encourage people to sign up early! You can offer early bird, regular, late, and day-of registration options, that increase a bit in price each time. If people take advantage of the earlier tiers, you’ll have a better idea of how many attendees to expect (as well as where you are financially) going into the event!

For the most part, running a tournament is not a one-person job, so you’ll want to bring on some volunteers to help you out!

Choosing volunteers – Before you start to ask around for help or choose your volunteers, you’ll want to consider how many volunteers you need! There are many areas where volunteers can lend a hand, including but not limited to:

Factors such as how many streams you’re having, how many events you’re running (and how many pools per event), and the length of your tournament will determine how many volunteers you should add to the team. A good idea is to put together a rough draft of a volunteer schedule with a list of all events and volunteer areas, as well as proposed shift lengths, so you have a better idea of how many people you’ll need.

A great way to take applications for volunteers is by using a Google form! You’ll want to include fields such as:

The Google form will compile all of these answers into a spreadsheet for you, so you can access everyone’s answers easily and build your schedule!

Volunteer schedule – Once you have all of your form responses, it’s time to build your schedule! You want try to schedule volunteer shifts around commentary blocks and pools times, and ensure that volunteers get breaks to eat and rest. Here are some volunteer scheduling tips to keep in mind:

Once the schedule is complete, send it out to the volunteers so they can check for any potential conflicts! A good way to facilitate this discussion (and also to help with communication the day of the event) is to set up a volunteer Discord server or Facebook chat.

Volunteer benefits – There’s quite a few ways that you can thank your volunteers for all of their help. At the bare minimum (and for smaller events), it’s recommended that you waive their venue fee if they plan to enter the tournament. Beyond that, a few ways to improve volunteer experience at larger/longer events are:

Of course, it’s important to note that hiring paid staff is an option as well, especially when it comes to roles that require a bit more experience, time, and responsibility!

It’s important to make sure you have enough setups to be able to complete your tournament in a timely manner. To know how many you’ll need, look at:

Based on knowledge from tournament organizers who have run multiple tournaments, ranging from locals to national sized events, the chart below provides estimated durations needed to complete play using various player-to-setup ratios.

If you’re doing Top 8 as best of 5, the estimate runs to 20 minutes average set length for those sets, and in that case a 16 player bracket on 4 setups would run ~110 minutes.

This is an estimate and won’t tell you specifically the exact number of set ups you need, so there is definitely room to optimize. For example, 32 setups for a 64 person bracket is optimal, but not always realistic, whereas 16 is much more so. If running a larger tournament, perhaps with 256 participants, you’ll have 16 pools of 16 entrants, and could run 4 pools per wave with 16 total setups.  This would move too slowly, and something closer to 48 setups for an event like this would keep things moving at a better pace. Allocation options can vary too, 32 for pools & 16 for casuals instead is one option.

As a rule of thumb, we believe the 1:4 setup to attendee ratio is alright! For 16 player brackets, you always will want to aim for 4 setups so you can safely assume 2 hours each. There’s a few different ways to go about acquiring setups for your event. Each one has their pros and cons, so you’ll want to weigh your options and consider what’s going to work best for you!

Getting Setups for Your Event

Type of pools/bracket – There are many different format options to choose from for tournaments! Will you run one large bracket, or will you split the bracket into pools? Pools are the best option if you have a high number of attendees, as it’s easier to manage and will help you to finish faster. If your pools are smaller (8 players or less) you can try out a round robin format, so players can get more matches in. With fewer attendees, it’s fine to run one double elimination bracket.

You’ll also need to determine whether scoring will be best of 3 (Bo3) or best of 5 (Bo5). More best of 5 sets means the tournament lasts longer but it also mean the players get more matches, so it’s a good idea to discuss this with your community as well. Here are some examples of what past tournaments have done:

Schedule – You want to make sure you’re not starting your pools or your bracket too early or too late. Anything earlier than 10am is usually a no-go.  At the same time, starting too late may mean people have to stay late into the night.   The more extreme the hours, the more likely it is that players won’t be able to be present, which harms both the event and community as they’ll be unlikely to return. Keep your players’ best interests in mind, and don’t be afraid to ask for input so that you know what works and what won’t. Some additional scheduling best practices to help you get started are:

Side events – Hosting events beyond the main bracket is a great way to add value to your tournament and increase attendance! Your attendees will love that they get to play more matches in an amateur bracket (for players who get knocked out of the main bracket early) or a ladder (a matchmaking format that allows players to continuously queue against other players), and hosting a different game completely as a side event can help to spice things up and encourage players who don’t typically come your events to check it out. For more information on adding value to your tournament, click here!

Rulesets – To select a ruleset for your tournament, do some research on the rulesets that larger events use. Some good places to check for this info are:

These are the rules that most people will be familiar with, so they’re the ones you’ll want to use as well.

In order for your event to be a smashing success, people have to know it’s happening! Work out a plan to promote your tournament to potential attendees, to make sure that you get the word out without spamming everyone. Some of the top ways to advertise your tournament are:

Some tips to keep in mind when making posts are: