Lets get you set up to host a tournament

Since 2009, the mission of Challonge has never wavered. We strive to make tournament management easier. Whether that tournament is a 500+ player esport tournament, or a group of 4 friends playing a tabletop game, Challonge has you covered. In this guide, we’ll cover the very basics of creating your first tournament and help you get underway.

Create an account for free at Challonge.com

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You have the option of creating an account with us, or signing in using a Discord or Facebook account.

Hosting a tournament as an individual or start building a community.

First, some terms...

Hosting as an individual means that the Challonge tournaments you create are tied only to your Challonge account. If you're looking to host a one-off tournament or a few with close friends, this is a perfectly fine option for you.

Whereas, if you host tournaments as a community, that community page is where your tournaments live. Communities are engineered to provide hosts with the tools to establish and then grow their community on Challonge. Post announcements, grow your community follwer count or create a ranked leaderboard to track performance of community members, Challonge has you covered.

We have a detailed guide here on how to setup your first Challonge Community.

Building your tournament

Whether you're hosting as an individual or a community, the tournament creation tool is pretty much the same.

If you plan on hosting regular tournaments, you can create a tournament template as an individual or as a community to be used over and over. Here's our support article on it: https://kb.challonge.com/en/article/creating-using-tournament-templates-1bh8spw/

Basic Info

Host: Here, you can select whether your hosting your tournament as an individual or as part of a community. If you don't own or have admin privileges to a community, this field won't be clickable.

Tournament Name: What should your tournament be called? This will be display at the top of the bracket page so make sure it pertains to your event. The title will also show up in search on Challonge if someone were to search for the game you're hosting. So, if you're looking to attract other Challonge players, make sure this title makes sense.

URL: You can randomize the URL or create a custom one (so long as the names not already taken). Make sure to leave out any cuss words or vulgar language as your tournament will be flagged as toxic and removed from the platform.

Description: The tournament description is the best way for you to communicate with registrants. Times, location, prize-pools you name it - you can put them in the tournament description. Also, you can upload images here. So, if you're working with some sponsors or have a graphic for your event, you can upload it to the tournament description.

Game Info

Game: Here's where you enter the game, sport or activity you'll be hosting. We have thousands of options in our database and you'll see that based off the text your entering, you'll be given some options. That said, Challonge will let you input anything into the game field - regardless of it being in our database.

Type: There's two 'types' of styles you can go for when hosting on Challonge: single-stage or two-stage. Two-stage is most commonly used for multi day events. For instance, a group round robin that cuts the top 8 into a single elimination bracket. We have a whole support article on Challonge competition formats.

Format: The format is the kind of bracket you wish to use. From single elimination to swiss, we have you covered. Click to learn more about our competition formats.

Registration

Registration: Challonge offers two types of registrations: Providing a list of participants or a signup page. A list of participants means that you, as the host, will invite all participants to join the tournament via their Challonge username or emails. Hosting a signup page essentially means public registration. Anyone on Challonge can register for this tournament (you can always go in after and remove individuals).

By utilizing a signup page, hosts can take advantage of using custom fields to collect necessary data from registrants. For instance, you might ask for their phone numner, email or Discord tag so you can get in contact with them. Here's our support article on custom fields.

Registration Fee: Challonge offers both free entry and paid entry tournaments right on the platform via Stripe. To learn more, read this support article.

Participants: If you're planning on hosting a team-based tournament, you'll want to click the checkbox. By default, it's not checked. We have a whole support article on team-registration here.

Start Time: This allows you to create a start date & time for your bracket. Date and time is determined by the settings of your Challonge account - be sure to double check it's set to the correct time zone. If you're not certain of the start time, or just getting a jump start on creating brackets, you can always mark the tournament as tentative and come back later to add a start time.

Note: You can also manage check-ins. This is a notification that is sent to all registrants prior the set start time prompting them to check-in to play. You can learn more about it in this article.

The start time on the bracket will be different for users in different time zones in an effort to avoid confusion.

Predictions & Voting

Enable voting for open matches allows users with Challonge accounts to vote for their favorite participants.

Voting is not available for Round Robin and Free For All formats.

Updated on: 19/02/2025