The Tome of Tournaments (Part 2)

Update History
v 1.00: guide was finished and posted. Had to split it into 2 guides because it was too long



Table of Contents

THIS PART OF THE GUIDE STARTS AT SECTION B. IF YOU WANT TO READ SECTION A, GO TO PART 1 HERE

(cntrl f the roman numeral or the parentheses + letter to search a section. sections may be named a bit differently than in the ToC)

stuff in spoiler is not in this part

(SB) Running the Actual Tournament

vii. The Golden Rule of Tournament Organizing: Everything will (might) go Wrong
viii. Democracy Versus Dictatorship: How to effectively make Decisions with Your Team
ix. General Duties you Should Expect During the Tournaments
x. Commentary: Some Notes on how you can help Commentary Teams
xi. Personal Opinions on Some Tournament Related Things

(SC) Conclusion

(EX): Extra section: Other stuff I’m involved in or work on


So you’ve done all the pre stuff, and it’s finally time for game day. You’re hyped up as much or even more than the players, and it’s time for the real test of your TOing skill: dealing with problems, making judgements, and typing in results. If there were three words that I could use to sum up the entirety of what you need to run the event without it going belly up, they would be Preparation, Patience, and Swiftness. We’ve gone over pre tournament preparation, but game day preparation is a different matter (especially for online tournaments). Patience is a virtue you’re going to have to have to not rip your eyeballs out, and swiftness is what you strive for to make sure things run without a hitch.


Really most of the enjoyment of TOing comes from running the floor, at least for me. Signups, topic writing, rulemaking is all typically pretty laid back discussion. It’s pretty hard to have fun making rules or topics unless you’re just into that sort of thing. I personally enjoy writing the topics (and especially making the name), but the rest is really just busywork that isn’t boring per se but is mostly just neutral stuff I have to do. Game day however is when the hype starts. Every saturday I’m dreading waking up at 10AM sunday just to get to everything in order then spend 2 hours making sure people understand what’s happening and that things are shipshape. And then I wake up a little earlier than 10 AM and have a blast all day until it comes to a close at usually around 4 (it starts at 12 central typically, so it’s a 6 hour job essentially). Why? Because everyone's having a great time, and it really rubs off on you. Sure, you have to make hard decisions sometimes, and drop the banhammer occasionally, but otherwise you’ll find yourself gasping at the great plays and laughing at the horrible, horrible puns you and your staff mates make.


Anyway, let’s get to the bread and butter: how to not **** everything up and have fun doing it.

​

Or rather, everything might go wrong and you’ll have to assume it will or else the things you think won’t go wrong will go wrong and you’ll have a mighty big mess on your hands.


I am dead serious. Your preparations had better be airtight stainless steel, because gameday will fall on them like a washing machine from the empire state building. If you have a rule, expect it to be invoked. Expect a lot of situations you have to call that aren’t so cut and dry. Expect just enough ****ty trash talk to make at least one team mad, and expect enough lag to make every other team mad too.


This is where things become very much experience based. If you’re new you will not be able to predict all the problems that may come up. Things will go wrong that you didn’t even consider could happen. And we can divy up all these problems you’ll have to handle into two categories: things you made rules for (or that the framework deals with), and things you didn’t that you still have to make calls on. I will also discuss things you should probably not make calls on in most cases.


Ok, so the first are problems you made rules for, and what you will find is that if your rules are good invoking them as they are can solve most of the problems. Someone shows up late and you have a good rule about that? No one should be asking questions. What you have to analyze with rules, however, is really the extent you want to enforce them, and this is dependent on your own philosophy for how tourneys should be run and what tournament you’re running. For signups this would be like: should you let someone in who was 15 minutes late if you put a 10 minute time limit on it, but they let you know early and had a good excuse, IE someone was on the ****ter and couldn’t make it, or they were finishing eating, or they slept through their alarm or something. Many would choose to be lenient and allow the person to play with a warning, because though they weren’t on time they were really damn close and didn’t seem to do it out of malice, something that may make the other team they need to play mad. Some will disqualify the team, because they broke the rules and were late, which is fair but may make the team disappointed (though no one can say you were really wrong in the call). Another example is match time. If you put up restrictions on match time, how lenient should you be with matches that go over? When should you grant extensions, if ever?


Alot of that comes down to experience and just what you personally lean towards. I’m personally surprisingly lenient with showing up times so long as i know the captain was there earlier, which happens pretty often. If I hear no hide or tail of them I usually go with the strict interpretation. For the second example it depends heavily on the game and match and how your timetable works. Ideally you’ll have a little time leftover to be more lenient on match times. If a team is legitimately having issues that seem like they’ll clear up pretty fast, or if they're being ****ed over by bad connections causing a replay or two, I think granting an extension is fair, but if someone seems to be AWOL or trying to ‘game us’ I won’t hesitate to loss them.


So a lot of it is really a gray area that changes depending on the situation that's given to you, and it’s up to you and your team to decide. There’s rarely an absolutely perfect solution, and don’t beat yourself up if you mess up a call here. Remember, every mistake is a learning experience, so as long as you understand how not to mess it up again and pledge not to, then you should be able to make every tournament better than the last.


Now we move on to the second cases, which are problems that your rules don't cover. The main issue here is you don’t have something to make judgments with, and you’re going to have to defend your actions to yourself, your staff, and possibly to the players. Here are some general guidelines to dealing with issues that come your way, regardless of what they are:

1. First, identify the issue and if the issue brought forward is actually an issue (more on that later)
   
   
2. Then, identify everyone that it affects, and whether it affects the game directly, or something supplementary, like the chat or records or something
   
   
3. Next, identify how it affects people. Who is hurt by it, if anyone? Who is helped by it, if anyone? How does it hurt/help those people, if it does at all?
   
   
4. Now, determine whether or not the effects of the issue (if there are any) are in the spirit of the tournament or not. Whether or not there are no direct effects, identify if the behavior or happening is in the spirit of the tournament or not.
   
   
5. Consider if this is at all relatable to issues you’ve had in the past, if you have had any. If it is, you should probably abide by the standard you used then, adjusting if need be for specifics.
   
   
6. If the above is not applicable, use the information you’ve gathered above as best you can to make a judgment call, if you need to make a judgment call at all. If not, kindly inform the players that the issue does not need a call made on it
   

Now let’s discuss each of these in a little more detail.


1: First, identify the issue and if the issue brought forward is actually an issue


This is a pretty cut and dry guideline, but the mass of different possible issues means that there’s a lot of disgression between what is an issue you need to rule on, and what isn’t. Identifying the issue is usually as simple as reading the complaint, though for particularly wordy complaints you’ll need to isolate what’s happening from whatever they’re saying. Speed is mainly what you want to aim for here: it’s pretty unlikely the issue you find from their mass of words is going to be the wrong issue, and even if it is they’ll likely explain it again. Ask for clarification if you need to, but don’t leave them hanging: it may just make them angrier and when situations become emotionally charged, and then it’s hard for anyone to come out as a winner. Next you determine if it has something to do with a rule. If it does then your job gets cut short and you can simply tell them to follow that example. But if not, you’ll need to move on to step 2.


Now what also merits note is that there will be several issues brought to you that you need to choose not to rule on. First off you may just lack the information to make a good ruling on the case, in which case you’ll have to explain that to the players and throw it out or take actions that assume you can’t make a fair ruling. Really how often that happens depends on the nature of the game and how often you can keep an eye on things. Mandating evidence will do a lot to minimize those types of claims, but that comes with other negative effects (timetable). But besides that, The most common thing invoked that you’re not going to punish someone over is going to be bad sportsmanship, because of how wide of an umbrella bad sportsmanship covers. Teams that think they can get free wins by inciting the opponent to anger will quickly report minor insults, like noob, in hopes that they ‘technically’ count as bad sportsmanship so clearly you’ll need to rule against the team throwing the insults. This and all iterations of it regarding other rules and gray areas is something known as rulesharking, a term popularized by the yugioh community, which basically means a team or player willing to invoke even the smallest rule against the opponent, even if it was an honest mistake or something very minor, to try and get more victories. Another example of this would be the touch move rule in chess, if we pretend it does not have the words ‘intentionally’ in the rule. So in case you’re not aware, Chess is often played with a rule known as touch move, where when a player (intentionally) touches a piece, he has to move it. A ruleshark would be the player that tries to force players to move pieces that they bump with their arms accidentally or have to touch for some other reason. Imagining that there was no intentional clause in the touch move rule, the ruleshark would technically be right: the other player should have to move the piece. But no TO would honestly want to rule in his favor in that situation, so he’ll typically just warn the player and move on, usually at the protest of the ruleshark. Sometimes you will find yourself having to rule in favor of the ruleshark, but for situations where it seems like a team is trying to take advantage of punitive rules for minor offenses, it’s often best to swear off actively ruling for or against their claim, just saying ‘don’t do it again’, and throwing the claim out.

So to summarize, you’ll typically throw out claims for really small, insignificant things, things you can’t effectively rule on, or rules invoked with malicious rulesharking in mind


2: Then, identify everyone that it affects, and whether it affects the game directly, or something supplementary, like the chat or records or something


This is the next logical step to decision making. If you’re going to rule for or against something for someone, you have to determine who those someones are that are affected. If a team D/Cs, that would be that team and the team they’re playing against. If someone’s spamming the chat, it’s affecting everyone by retarding the flow of important tournament information. If someone cheats and attempts to lie to get a win, that affects the entire tournament, and most especially that team and his opponent. Typically the issues that you’ll have to rule harshest on are the latter types: malicious efforts that undermine the integrity of the entire tournament, such as cheating, forging evidence, and lying. Whether it affects the game directly or not is basically if it happens in game or not. So if you cheat on HH bridge then that would be directly affecting the flow of the game and hindering the tournament, whereas if you spam the chat that’s directly damaging the supplementary communication necessary to run the tournament, and hindering it. This guideline is in all honesty fairly clear cut, so it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get the hang of.


3: Next, identify how it affects people. Who is hurt by it, if anyone? Who is helped by it, if anyone? How does it hurt/help those people, if it does at all?


I kind of touched on this a little in the explanation of 2, but this is essentially appraising the effects that the malicious behavior had. If someone’s cheating, it’s helping them, hurting the opponent, and messing up the tournament results maliciously. If a team D/Cs, it’s only hurting that team that D/Ced, and thus indirectly helping the team they’re playing against. There aren’t many actions that would hurt both sides, or help both sides. The former I like to refer to as kamikaze tactics, though there’s not much room for it in Splatoon. It would be something like forcing random large amounts of people from both teams to disconnect. Essentially something that causes relatively indiscriminate damage to both teams. Something that helps both teams would tend to be things like under the table deals to ignore certain rules or report certain scores (Like say both teams agreed to only play one game and claim the prior score was 2:2 even though they hadn’t played before, that helps both teams equally while still being very clearly against the rules and the spirit of the tournament). There also may be efforts to tear the entire tournament down by either sleazy means or otherwise. It’s hard to predict exactly what that would entail, but think tampering with or destroying results. It’s very serious stuff, but you can pretty easily avoid attempts like that online by just not letting people have editing access to your results.


4: Now, determine whether or not the effects of the issue (if there are any) are in the spirit of the tournament or not. If there are no direct effects, identify if the behavior or happening is in the spirit of the tournament or not.


This is digression highway. Even if it’s not written directly on the rules, does something seem like it’s really off base and against what the tournament is trying to accomplish? That’s something you should rule against. Even if it doesn't actually affect anything, like bad sportsmanship (if you don’t count psychology), you really should consider if it’s in the spirit of the tournament or not. If it’s not then typically action should be taken, appropriate to the effects discovered in 3, and how many times the problem(s) arose with the players. For really minor things, like sportsmanship, a warning is usually ok, unless it’s a really bad example of it (constant racial slurs thrown around, for example).


5: Consider if this is at all relatable to issues you’ve had in the past, if you have had any. If it is, you should probably abide by the standard you used then, adjusting if need be for specifics.

Important. If I could label any of these guidelines as more important than the others, I would say this one is by far the most important. It’s similar to how judges work in court cases: if a similar situation came up in the past, a judge is expected to act in accordance with the ruling given then, if there isn't a direct law or a decision from an above court to go by instead. Except in extreme cases they will typically stick to the previous ruling. So too you should try your best to be consistent. If you rule easily early for one thing then kick someone out for the same thing in a later tournament, it makes you look like you’re playing favorites, or moody, and it doesn’t make you seem like a consistent, reliable TO. Except in extreme cases, live up to your previous rulings if something very similar came up in the past, unless they were very clearly wrong rulings.


6: If the above is not applicable, use the information you’ve gathered above as best you can to make a judgment call, if you need to make a judgment call at all. If not, kindly inform the players that the issue does not need a call made on it


If you can’t live up to a previous ruling, it’s time to make a new page in your TO history book. Check and doublecheck the info and thoughts you’ve amassed and make a clear and concise decision relating to the issue. If someone gets mad, try and explain to them why you made the choice. Don’t get hung up over making the perfect answer or the perfect ruling: trust your judgment and you’ll almost always be ok.

And remember, if you **** up a ruling it’s far from the end of the world. My first ever ruling I had to make in my first ever event was the wrong decision. I don’t even say that subjectively, the ruling was wrong from an objective standpoint. I don’t even remember exactly what it was, I only remember how ****ing stupid my decision was. Don’t beat yourself up if you make your own mistake, and instead strive to learn from it and not make it again. Little mistakes today are mistakes you don’t make tomorrow.


So hopefully this section has given you some insight into how to make good decisions in the event of issues. Rules are a saving grace for common things, but you will often find yourself making a handful of pivotal decisions without their help. So long as you keep those guidelines in mind, and are honest with yourself and the evidence before you, you should be able to come to a decision relatively quickly. I know the above section made the process seem like a long slugfest, but it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to come up with what you need to and think up a ruling. The more experience you have doing it, the more automatic it becomes, and you’ll soon find yourself able to make snap rulings over and over in events both big and small.



Decision making in tournaments usually has its own, private rules between staff members running said tournament. The reason for this is that issues for a tournament need to be handled relatively efficiently, or else your timetable can be knocked way out of control. Hell, even if you do handle problems with efficiency, the timetable can still be knocked out of control. However, you and your team need to be trained to handle issues efficiently so that issues that shouldn’t run up your timetable don’t. A big part of this is understanding your own rulesets and preparing for these situations to come up by having rules for them in place. However, as mentioned in the previous section it’s impossible to prepare for every issue. While that section focused on the logic you use to actually come to a decision, this section focuses on communicating with your team and setting things up so that your timetable isn’t run out of control.

So the question is then raised: Should decision making be made like a democracy or a dictatorship, or somewhere in between? I will start off by saying being a pure democracy is almost never a good option. Everyone should have a say and put their opinions forward, but waiting for everyone to come together, debate, and then vote possibly followed by more debate, another vote, and hurt feelings for the minority, is a pretty big time sink. It can also cause an us versus them vibe when issues come up during a tournament: Instead of focusing on fixing the issue, sides will focus on winning the debate. This will often lead to tension between staff members and can lead to taking a long time when coming to decisions.

However, a pure dictatorship may breed ire among staff who feel their opinions are ignored, and can cause them to overly rely on the head TO to make decisions. If one guy makes all the decisions, the staff may feel like distrusted lackeys who just enter results all day.

Usually I’d say you will want to fall somewhere in-between democracy and dictatorship when running a tournament. Personally what I like to do is retain final say as head TO of my tournaments. This is a practice I half-ripped from yugioh: where players appeal to head judges for final decision, and edited to my own liking. Basically, if an issue comes up that a member of the staff doesn’t feel comfortable handling on his own, or I see the issue too and we disagree with how to handle it, we discuss it for a little while in the staff chat. people make their points quickly and come to their conclusions. If everyone comes to an agreement, we go with that. However, if the staff is torn, instead of putting it to a vote, I will usually make the final decision for the staff. This cuts out the voting time and gives everyone a fair platform to put forth their ideas, even though they ultimately don’t get to vote. The goal is for them to convince me of their position quickly. Whichever side I'm more convinced by, whether by my own logic or others, is the side I go with. The staff isn’t powerless: I don’t handhold them for every issue or demand I make every choice. But when something big comes up and an agreement isn’t fast approaching, I flex my final say power to keep everything moving, and take full responsibility if I make the wrong call.




This section is a list of general duties you should expect to do fairly consistently when running tournaments, with a short summary regarding each. It’s mainly for newer TOs who haven’t had their feet in the water yet, so they don’t go in totally blind.

a. Answering (more) questions

Again, remain polite no matter how stupid the questions are that people ask you. I can’t stress this enough. But yeah, you’re going to be asked even more questions right before, during, and sometimes even after the tournament. They’re still going to be obvious pretty often, too. But that’s what you signed up for.

b. Making sure everyone is present

Basically roll call like they did in school. There are a lot of different ways to do this, some more onerous than others. Regardless of how you plan on doing it, you do need to do it so matches where no one shows up don’t hang for longer than they should. Multiple day tournaments or tournaments with breaks in them will need to have multiple roll calls.

c. Making sure everyone has the bracket and any other resource they need (IE: map list)

This is usually pretty easy. Just don’t forget to make sure all the resources people need are easily accessible. At the very least make sure they’re in the topic. If you make use of Discord or another similar chat client you can make a special room for said resources and post them there. Just make sure no one else can chat in that channel. You should probably put the resources up a little while before the tournament actually starts.

d. Gathering results

Seems pretty obvious, but this usually requires quite a bit of focus and attention, especially if results are put in the same channel as the general chat. Try your best not to miss anything. Making a separate area for reporting results is probably a good idea too, but keep in mind some people may forget to use this section so you’ll need to watch the general chat too.

e. Reviewing footage

Every once in a while people will come forward with footage or proof you need to look over. Usually this is involved with a dispute. Try and keep things moving if you have to wait on uploads and other things. Youtube uploads especially can end up forcing you to wait a very long time before you can check the video. Keep the teams playing while you wait for the footage, or make a call without it depending on the situation. Refer to the previous 2 sections for more info regarding resolving problems

f. Helping players contact each other

Sometimes players just have issues finding their opponents. Keep an eye on who represents who and point people to their opponents when possible. This is made easier by taking up a list of representatives beforehand. You’ll mostly have to do this when dealing with online chatrooms, and not so much IRL. instead, IRL you’ll more often have to...

g. Direct people to stations

People have to be moved around efficiently to keep the tournament running in a real life setting. Make sure everyone knows where to be and when to be there. A good sound system makes announcing things easier. Try to avoid hunting players: get them to come to you to find the next place they need to be and the next match they need to play.

h. Letting people know when it’s time for them to play (or when they have an opponent)

It’s prudent to notify people when they have an opponent for their next match so they don’t sit around. Not really necessary, but a nice thing to do. I usually tell people their next opponent, if they have one, after they post or bring me their results.

i. Closing out the tournament

It’s professional to announce when the tournament is closed. This also includes making a results topic, which I recommend doing at most a few hours after the tournament. The results topic is a great place to get feedback so you can make your next event even better!

Think of anything else for this section? let me know and I may include it. If I do I will give you credit.



A tournament doesn’t really need commentary, but it’s a great way to get spectators involved and build hype for it. If you’re new to the business you probably shouldn’t try and get commentary and instead focus on making sure the main experience is up to standards. If you have a few tournaments under your belt, however, I highly recommend putting together a commentary team if you can manage it.


This section is not focused on putting together commentary teams. Frankly I don’t know much about the subject. Contact some people who typically commentate and ask if they or someone they know would like to do some commentary on some of the tournament matches. If you have any friends you know would like to get to do the job, hit them up and let them know the score.

Now first things first. Commentators need to be even more aware of the schedule and what’s going to happen than the actual teams. Make doubly sure they have the bracket, the map list, the other resources, and that they aren’t confused on anything. Especially the time. The last thing you want is a commentary team showing up late.


During the tournament you should generally try and keep them up to date on goings ons. What do the results look like? How is the round going? Is the timetable going to get messed up at all? These are all issues the commentators can talk about, as well as things that allow them to plan out their streams accordingly. Especially make sure they’re notified of any delays in the tournament. Commentators and large amounts of hang time rarely mix well, and while they can do a lot to keep the space of time interesting, if there’s a huge gap between games they commentate on it can run off spectators.

Taking up surveys and collecting information for them will help them enrich their commentary and fill in blank spots. However, I would avoid mandating these surveys because they can annoy some teams that just want to sign up.

Really that’s pretty much all I can say about commentary teams. They’ll usually work pretty autonomously from you other than you giving them info, so you don’t have to keep a close reign on them or anything. If anyone working in commentary has anything to add that would help them or make things better for them/that they like, let me know.

​

This is where I jump on my soapbox and just talk about my personal ideas regarding some things regarding tournaments. This isn’t at all necessary to learning more about running events, but if you want to hear more about my philosophy and my opinions about some issues regarding tournaments, then feel free to read on.


Generally for strictness I’ve been called a pretty lenient guy, especially with late teams. Generally I always axe teams I haven’t heard hide nor tail of, but if a team says they need 10 minutes to get ready, and that’d make them late, I generally like to give it to them. To me there are a lot of things that can cause that, so I don’t like being hard on teams that are just a little late and let me know. That’s the same with a lot of things honestly regarding the timetable. If a team needs to go eat for 20 minutes that’s fine so long as they let me know and are back in time. If a team drops and tells me I’ll also usually count it as a null game rather than a DQ to show the fact that they did notify me. Teams that don’t will get the -1 score of SHAME.

With my staff I like to be able to depend on them for handling most small issues. It also helps build up their experience too, so if a question comes up sometimes I give them a chance to answer instead of jumping at it myself. They’re a huge help when it comes to getting results and doing signups and roll call and stuff. It’s true I could do it alone, but I’d be pulling my hair out at some point if I did. I rarely make use of my ‘final say’ right because I typically get along really well with my staff so we usually see eye to eye pretty quickly on issues. They’ve even run SCL in my stead once before, and did quite a good job of doing it.

If a tournament does badly that I’m the head TO of I take full responsibility for it except in extreme cases. That doesn’t mean I won’t lambast the rest of the staff for doing something stupid of course, but it does mean I have to make sure the tournament is up to standard so I don’t make myself look bad by running a shoddy event.

Nothing kills a series or league or anything faster than a staff that can’t work together. I would recommend you play games and do unrelated things with your staff to build up a friendly and cordial relationship with them. It helped a lot in the early days of SCL.

I’d like to use this line of text to say, make very very very very very very sure you make your topic pretty. Seriously, I stressed it in that section too, but NOTHING kills a tournament faster than a lazy looking topic. It’s all teams have to go on at first, so make it count.


I typically shy away from banning people from series if I can help it. Unless they do something egregious or constantly cause issues every tournament I usually forget about it by next tourney. It’s hard to keep people banned anyway with the number of ways to get around it and the lack of ways for me to check for it.


Usually I don’t expect teams to cheat, especially when money or prizes aren’t involved. Most will be honest in general. There are bad apples for sure, and you have to be vigilant, but I don’t usually expect a cheating epidemic, especially from accomplished teams. In yugioh it was a lot worse. People cheat their *** off in yugioh if they think they can get away with it. Rulesharking was also an epidemic in the game that I always hated dealing with. Other than that there was stacking, lying, sometimes even bribing. People would bribe people money (or cards) to win a round. It was ridiculous. They’d get their *** kicked right the **** out if they got caught though.


I like to offer help to newer tournaments that I see making a good effort in their topic, personally. Especially if they don’t have a full team for game day. If you see me posting in your topic as a relatively new TO, it’s probably to praise you since I don’t actually play the game anymore. Don’t think if I don’t post I don’t like your tournament by the way: it’s just something I do randomly when I feel like it.




So we’ve finally reached the end of this monolith sized guide. I thank you for making it this far, whether you skimmed some parts or not, and hope you got as much out of this as I did writing it. If I can leave you with one thing above all, it’s to remember that TOs, at their core, are servants of the community whose job is of utmost importance to everyone having a good time. It’s your job to bring joy to scores of people through hosting your events, and to maybe even raise money for charities or other things through them as well. If you put in the effort to read all through this to learn more about TOing, then I’m sure you’ll be able to put in the effort to run a kickass tournament. Even if you run into problems or make mistakes, remember that so long as you strive to improve everything you do is worth something.

Go out to the world and bring awesome tournaments to every community you join.