How To Host Your Own Tournament

 If you want to host your own tournament, the first thing you need to decide is this: will it be an online event or a LAN (local area network) event? Here are a few tips for organising each of these types of tournaments.

Organising Online Events

For these types of tournaments, you can use a service like Brackot, which will make your life much easier.

The second thing to think about is the tournament format and how many teams will it have. Then you need to make sure that all of these teams are located in the same region or at least in regions that are close to each other, to minimize the ping issues.

The third thing to consider is the streaming aspect and the promotion of the tournament. Do you intend to have your tournament watched by an audience? Do you know all of the teams or do you need to find them? Questions like these should always be on your mind when organising an esports event.

The fourth is the prize pool and its distribution. If you want to organise a major event that offers prize money, you will have to consider all of the legal and financial aspects involved in that.

Organising LAN Events

LAN events are even harder to organise, for obvious reasons. You need to talk to the teams, sell tickets, make hotel reservations, have the necessary equipment, have a team that knows how to use that equipment, rent a space in which you will bring everyone, and so on.

When you first organise a LAN event, you need to keep it simple and prepare in advance. Otherwise, you may end up having numerous technical difficulties that will ruin and fragment the action.

Among other things, you need to think about the router you will use, the PCs, the ethernet cables, the network cards, the internet connection, the game and software that should be installed on each PC, the equipment needed to film the players and broadcast the event, and the schedule of the tournament.

Keep in mind that people need to eat, sleep, sit down, go to the bathroom, have the ability to socialize, and so on. All of these little things add up. And the more people are involved, the harder it is to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

In esports like Dota 2 and CS:GO, LAN events are organized by companies that have tremendous experience in this. They have large teams of experts who know how to do everything from scratch and fix any issue that might come up. If you want to do what they do, you will need to do your research and learn as you go along. The likelihood of doing everything perfect from the first try is extremely low. So start with something simple and build on top of it over time, making each subsequent event bigger and more spectacular.

Licensing

Something important to remember when organising an esport tournament, is unlike in traditional sports there is an organisation out there who has ownership of the game you want to play. This means they own the characters, the art, and can determine the limits of your tournament.

This is the major difference between organsing esports and traditional sports. In traditional sports, nobody owns the soccer ball, or the idea of the game. In Esports, the publisher does own the ‘ball’ and you need permission to in many cases to use it.

Always research the community tournament guidelines of an esport title before you plan it. For many games you may be able to host tournaments without permission if you aren’t competing for money, or broadcasting the tournament.

Every game and publisher has different rules – so it’s always important to do your research.