Time is something you need a lot of. As a tournament operator (TO), you have a duty to be available as much as possible. You should be available to solve any disputes or questions when they are needed, not the following week because you were busy.

You need time to plan the tournament as well. A rushed tournament is a shoddy tournament at that. Are you going on vacation at any time that would overlap the tournament? Do you have a lot of schoolwork? Do you have to work a lot? If you answered yes to any of the questions, seriously consider not hosting a tourney at that time.

Time also refers to everyone else. In offline tournaments, they're run in a day or two. POSSIBLY three for large tournaments. Online however, things take a lot longer. When people have the leisure of doing tournaments, they tend to put things off for later. If you look at my tournament I hosted a bit ago ([ENDED] Super Smash Bros. Brawl Online Tournament (GwJumpman wins!)), I gave everyone a week for their round. That time period is usually fine, but as you can see if you read the tourney, people have issues. They don't have time to get their set (series of matches) complete that week. Unless you want to disqualify (DQ) a lot of people, you'll need to extend the time period sometimes. Of course, there is a limit that you simply have to cut off at; keep that in mind.

A method of setting up a bracket

Let me introduce you to a program called Tio. Tio is a program that lets you create a file for a tournament that has the type of game, the participants, what station they play on (irrelevant for online), and a bracket maker. Here's the link:

tio tournament organizer - All is Brawl

I HIGHLY recommend downloading and installing Tio for simplicity's sake. As for the actual brackets themselves, there are two types:

• Single Elimination
• Double Elimination

The definitions should be obvious, but if you don't know: Single elimination is when you have 1 loss before you're eliminated. If you lose once, you're out. Double Elimination is when you can have 2 losses. Obviously, lose twice and you're out.

When you have a double elimination bracket, you also have the addition of a new feature of the bracket: the loser's bracket. In a single elimination bracket, All names start on the left and moves to the right as people win until it hits one winner. In double elimination, imagine the bracket mirrored. It's hard to explain, but check it out in Tio.

Anyway, you're going to want to post every updated bracket into the thread of your tournament. If no one's updated, who going to know if their next opponent is ready for them? That'll delay time and your tourney will take even longer.

Experience

This obviously isn't something you can prepare for, but you need experience. No doubt when you first starting hosting tourneys, you're going to hit a few bumps on the road. The more tourneys you have, the smoother you'll run them and the better they'll go.

If you need specific help, I'd recommend asking myself or Dan. Dan's pretty knowledgeable from what I've seen and he knows what he's doing.

Miscellaneous
I'll stick information here that doesn't necessarily pertain to the other four topics.

Rules
When you write up your tourney thread, I sure as hell hope you include a section for rules. Rules in a tournament are a must because without rules, anyone can break what we think of as "implied rules" and simply say "Well, it's not against the rules. Problem?" and he'd be correct. He didn't break a rule. You need to construct a ruleset (I recommend using the most widely accepted competitive ones for accuracy) that have the least amount of known flaws as possible. And unfortunately, if a player finds a loophole and it technically doesn't break a rule, you have two choices: Ban him despite him not breaking a rule, let it go and append it to your next tournament's ruleset. I do recommend adding a "Any unsportsmanlike playing will result in punitive action at the TO's discretion." so that way, you can take matters into your hands when something like that happens.


I feel like I need to expand on stuff and whatnot. Please comment.