Registration Approval & the Waitlist

When someone registers, their entry moves through a short lifecycle before it counts toward your bracket: Pending (awaiting your review), then Approved or Rejected. If you'd rather skip manual review, turn on Auto-approve registrations in the registration card's Settings tab and every incoming registration is approved the moment it's submitted. For the full approve/reject workflow, see Manage Registrations.

This page covers what happens after that: the payment gate on paid tournaments, how a bracket handles an approved roster that isn't a power of two, the optional waitlist for full tournaments, and the self-service and substitution options available around a confirmed registration.

The payment gate on paid tournaments

If your tournament charges an entry fee, a new registration doesn't go straight to Pending. It first sits in a Pending Payment state until the participant completes payment. Only once payment clears does it move into the regular Pending queue for your review (or straight to Approved, if auto-approve is on). An unpaid registration isn't visible as something to act on in your Registrations list — it's genuinely blocked on the participant completing checkout.

Every approved entrant plays: byes fill the empty slots

A tournament's bracket is built from whoever is actually approved when you generate it. A clean knockout tree needs a power-of-two number of slots (8, 16, 32, and so on), so for single-elimination and double-elimination the bracket is sized up to the next power of two, and the empty slots become first-round byes for the top seeds. Fold seeding keeps the strongest seeds apart, so the byes land on them rather than on the weakest entrants.

For example: 9 approved entrants produce a 16-slot bracket where seeds 1 to 7 receive a first-round bye and seeds 8 and 9 play each other; 12 approved produce a 16-slot bracket where seeds 1 to 4 receive a bye; 16 approved fill the bracket exactly with no byes. Nobody is held back or excluded because of the size of the field.

Round robin, Swiss, and group-stage tournaments don't have this constraint — every approved entrant plays and no byes are needed for sizing.

The waitlist (optional)

The waitlist is an opt-in registration setting and is off by default. When it is off and the tournament reaches its participant cap, further sign-ups are blocked. When you turn on Enable Waitlist in the registration settings, sign-ups that arrive while the tournament is full are placed on the waitlist instead of being turned away.

• A waitlisted registration stays intact — the participant isn't rejected or removed — but it's not counted toward your approved roster numbers (headline participant counts, check-in eligibility, and the public participant list all reflect approved entrants only).
• Waitlisted entrants are ordered by registration time, so the person who signed up first is promoted first.

Managing the waitlist:

1. Open the Waitlist tab on the tournament's Registration Management card (in the sidebar's Participants section, the same entrants appear under Waitlisted). It shows how many people are waiting.
2. To bring someone into the active roster, click Promote next, or use Promote N to promote several at once.
3. Promotion is capacity-checked: if your approved roster is already full, the promotion is blocked until you free a slot.
4. When a registered participant withdraws or cancels their registration, the next person on the waitlist is promoted automatically, so you don't have to do it by hand.

Waitlisted participants who are never promoted simply don't seed the bracket.

Letting participants cancel or edit their own registration

Two separate options control what a participant can do to their own confirmed registration without contacting you:

• Self-cancel — the participant withdraws their own registration. This is blocked once they've checked in.
• Self-edit — the participant updates details on their own registration, such as their team name or their answers to your custom fields.

Both are off by default for a tournament, and each is controlled independently — enabling one doesn't enable the other. These aren't yet exposed as switches in the tournament dashboard; if you want either enabled for a specific tournament, this currently has to be turned on for you rather than toggled from a settings page. When an option is off, a participant who tries to cancel or edit their registration from the player-facing site sees a message that the action isn't available for that tournament.

Substituting a participant

If you expect roster changes — a player dropping out, a team swapping in a stand-in — turn on Allow Substitutions under Settings → Participant for the tournament. By default this is off, which blocks any substitution attempt outright. There's a separate option to allow substitutions to continue once the tournament is already in progress, rather than only before it starts.

For team tournaments, a team's own captain can perform a substitution themselves (swapping one roster member for another) as long as the team hasn't already used up its allotted number of substitutions — organizers and admins aren't the only ones who can act here. For individual tournaments, replacing the registered participant with a substitute is an organizer/admin action. Either way, the incoming substitute can't already be registered elsewhere in the same tournament, and a record of who was swapped in and out is kept against the registration.

What happens next

• Run check-in once your approved roster (waitlisted entrants are not part of it until promoted) is where you want it — only approved participants are eligible to check in.
• Review the full approve/reject workflow, auto-approve, and the waitlist in Manage Registrations.
• Configure registration windows, fees, and the waitlist option itself in Registration Settings.