Hi! My name is
Qrow. I run tournaments every month for a series called Lobster Roll, for a game called Zero-K. This article is being crossposted between many other communities I run tournaments for, namely SSBU and Guilty Gear. Regardless, the content in this article applies to any tournament hosted for any game.
First off, why do we host tournaments?
We host tournaments for many reasons, no matter what the sport or game being played is. The most obvious reason is likely that we need to give people who enjoy a given activity a way to express their skill in a competitive environment. Tournaments offer a clear way to visualize one’s skill against other players in terms of ranking and placement, and this system incentivizes players to do their best in order to get a better placing.
Another possible reason is community. Especially within esports, we tend to hang out around other players or people who share the same interests as us, and then end up going to tournaments with them. Over time, this builds communities that are usually based on region, but some communities may form with different sets of divisions. One famous example of this is the so-called “FGC” or fighting game community. Originally started as groups of players in local arcades, it has since grown to be an international community, although players still tend to be very proud of the region that they are from.
One other popular reason for tournaments to exist (and in some cases become overabundant with a small player base) is that some people who like playing games just really like hosting tournaments for a game they like. Whatever the reason may be, whether social, competitive, or something else, some people have strong driving reasons to donate precious free time to host events for others to come to, and usually are only paid by the personal satisfaction of having people that come to their event. For the rest of this article we will refer to such people as TOs, or tournament organizers.
^Recent footage from a tournament I worked on a team with
Now, many people wish to host their own tournament, which no doubt seems easy at first. All you have to do is get some people together and put them up against each other, right?
As anyone who has ever tried to do this knows, this is not how this experience usually goes in actuality.
First of all, there are many factors for an aspiring TO to consider. Getting players to your tournament in the first place has always been the hardest part of being a TO. You can’t do anything else without having players present in the first place, and getting there is always a multistep process. How will you advertise? What demographic do you want to attract? What is a good time or time zone? There are many questions that you have to ask and answer before even looking at setting up a bracket, and you can only answer some of them by trial and error.
Then, there’s bracket setup and math. How do you want players to progress through your bracket? Do you want stages? Maybe even pools if you have enough players, but then if you have pools, how many and how do you divide players up? What about round counts, rulesets, and managing entry? You also have to learn how to use a tournament hosting platform, of which there are many, all with their own quirks and features. Once you can decide all of this, you can start advertising and actually pulling in signups for your event…
…which then presents the user with the challenges of arranging a venue (somewhat easier if online, although communication platforms such as Discord are usually still needed), finding people to help run the event if the tournament is big enough, and then making sure everything goes smoothly once people are in the actual building. Oftentimes this is also coupled with making sure that other productions such as streams are running smoothly at the same time.
As a good example for the ZK specific crowd, I tried to run my first online tournament for Zero-K when I was about 14. At the time, I lacked a few essential things to be able to run tournaments well, even though I thought I had it all figured out:
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I had no clue what good bracketeering looked like, or even what an enjoyable consistent format would be
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I had no concept of timeliness, or respect for others’ time for that matter
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I did not anticipate the amount of difficulty that working with other humans being would bring, or the amount of complexity in dealing with international events
Thus, I ended up being a pretty disliked member of the Zero-K community for many years, although by now I’ve hosted enough “good” events that I hope I’ve made up for it. However, the reality regardless of what type of tournament it is is that other people’s time is
really, really valuable. Wasting people’s time, or making an event unfun is a surefire way to make sure you won’t be getting people to come for much longer.
Which leads to the topic of this article: What Makes a Tournament Great?
Ultimately, tournaments at their core need to make players feel like they got something out of the experience, and they need to make sure that they produce enjoyable results for spectators (because we live in the year 2025, and streaming is now vital to getting more people into your hobby). As a paper from CoHC[1] in 2009 puts it,
quote:
A primary goal of effective tournament design is to provide incentives for the participants to maximize their performance both during the tournament and in the time period leading up to the tournament. In spectator sports, a second goal of tournament design is to promote interesting match ups that generate fan interest. |
This being said, we can boil each component down into its respective parts.
First, we have the competitor side of it. What players ultimately come to most tournaments to do is win, whether they think about it like that or not. No one shows up to a tournament to try to lose, although they might know that they will going into it. Thus, we want to focus most on the two things the players will interact with directly besides the game - the bracket, and individual matchups. As said above, one core component of enjoyable tournaments is that the players want to maximize performance both during the tournament, and leading up to it. If a player knows what sort of situations they can find themselves in, they can better prepare for the tournament, and thus have a better experience while participating. Solid bracket formats such as Double Elimination let this happen - players who win play others who win, players who lose play who others who lose. The idea of having 2 lives is fairly easy to understand as well, so there is very little to misunderstand regarding pairings. If you wish to use a format like Swiss, this can become an issue as the math regarding who wins and tiebreakers becomes more confusing, although Swiss carries its own benefits in that it gives players more than three lives, thus letting them practice in a competitive environment more. As a TO, you have to learn how to judge your audience and then pick the right bracket format for your event.
The other aspect of fairness in this regard is the individual match pairing. If you play against someone who is far above your skill level in a bracket, you’d likely feel pretty rejected about the loss. But, if you have a close game and still lose, you’re far more likely to want to keep practicing because you have a much clearer goal to work towards. For brackets we try to balance this out with bracket pathing for high ranked players using something called seeding. Seeding lets us have high levels of good bracket avoidance between good players early, and in double elimination or other types of brackets still let players get fairly close games on rounds two and three, etc. While seeding your lowest seed into your highest round one does suck, it is preferable to have all your good players that will provide high quality matches for stream getting knocked out early. Usually as a TO, we end up doing some manual tweaking for enjoyment sake, but the principals are the same.
The other side of the tournament is the spectator and management side. For online tournaments, this can boil down to something as simple as making sure you have a well working stream and that you pick good, fun to watch matches for viewers. But in person, this becomes a bit harder. Does your venue have enough space? What about setups? Do you have adequate staff? Juggling all these things can be a pain, but if everything doesn’t go smoothly you will inevitably have people trash talking about your event afterwards.
Additionally, advertising and signups tend to be a very difficult point to manage well in the first place. Effectively advertising using online sites and social media seems to be very effective for tournaments, alongside the actual hosting platforms themselves. Additionally, you need to make sure that your tournaments are set up in an easy to understand and accessible way (e.x. Challonge page is nicely laid out, rules are posted clearly, schedules are denoted well with specific time zones, etc). Without these, people may do the only thing worse than not coming to your event - showing up at the completely wrong time and there not being an event at all.
All in all, running a great tournament is a pretty complicated task. However, if you take a step back and look at the individual components one by one, identifying the inner workings and managing to prepare effectively are perhaps not easy, but fairly straightforward. I would highly encourage anyone who truly loves a game they play to try their hand at hosting a tournament - you may find yourself a new hobby within a hobby that you didn’t even know you liked.
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[1]https://crossworks.holycross.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=econ_working_papers
