Seed and place participants

Seeding is the step between approving registrations and starting the tournament. It determines which participant starts in which slot of the bracket or group. Getting seeding right ensures fair matchups from round one.

Where to find it

Projects → [Your Project] → [Tournament] → Participants → Seeding

Step by step

1. Make sure participants are registered and approved. Only approved participants can be seeded. See Manage registrations if you still have pending applications.
2. If check-in is enabled, complete check-in first so the seed list reflects who is actually confirmed. See Check-in.
3. Navigate to Participants → Seeding.
4. Choose a seeding method: rating, ranking, performance, balanced, geographic, or custom. Each method orders participants automatically based on the data behind it (for example, existing rating or ranking).
5. Review the generated seed list. Use Auto-seed to regenerate it from the selected method, or drag participants up and down the list to reorder them by hand — a manually moved participant is tagged as a manual seed so you can see which entries were adjusted from the automatic result.
6. Click Save to confirm the seed numbers. A separate preview action lets you check the projected seeding before you commit to it.

The bracket is populated from the saved seed list once you generate it.

For single-elimination and double-elimination tournaments, the bracket is sized to the largest power-of-two number of approved participants. If your approved count isn't a power of two, the weakest seeds don't get a bracket slot — they're automatically moved to a reserve bench instead. You can promote participants from the reserve bench (one at a time or in bulk) from the participants list if a bracket slot opens up, for example after a withdrawal. Formats without a bracket, such as round robin, Swiss, and group stage, aren't affected — every approved participant plays.

Managing final standings

After the tournament concludes, navigate to Structure → Final Standing to review the official results, computed from how the bracket or stage played out. You can export the standings to CSV. If a placement needs to be corrected — for example a participant who was disqualified or withdrew mid-event — contact support, since final-standing overrides aren't available directly from this page yet.

Placement rules for multi-stage tournaments

If your tournament has multiple stages (for example a group stage feeding into a playoff bracket), use Structure → Placement to define how participants advance between them. A placement rule maps a source stage and rank (such as "1st place in Group A") to a target stage and position (such as "Position 1 in the Playoffs bracket"), so results from an earlier stage automatically carry into the next one. This is separate from seeding, which sets the starting positions within a single stage.

What happens next

With participants seeded, you can schedule match times and then publish and go live. During the event, use Live operations to monitor match progress and intervene if needed.