So lets say you have a close group of friends that you work with and have formed an “out-of-work social gaming relationship” and one day someone says in your headset (or in person at work) “let’s make a tournament and see who’s the best!” With the competitive nature of you and your network everyone is bound to be a part of this event due to the need to know who is the best among them. As a gamer, I can relate to this! So that is why today I am here to help you learn how to set up and run a professional gaming tournament. No paper. No pencils. All digital!
How to Host a Gaming Tournament
- Decide the hosting site. So, you have your 8-12 people for your friendly work tournament. How do you know what the best options are? There are many options to host your tournament online, as someone with 7+ years experience in hosting tournament these are the TWO best options on the net and it’s not even close in my opinion
– Battlefy.com
– Challonge.com - For the sake of this article let’s use Battlefy! Name your tournament and add a logo. Nothing worse than letting your great event go to waste all because of imagery issues; there’s a free service that I will show you to help fix that problem! Let’s say your scenario is different and you are hosting a tournament to build a brand and network with other players. You want to have a clean, catchy tournament name and a nice-looking logo. As far as getting a logo for FREE my go-to app for anything in the design world is CANVA. Don’t have CANVA but want it? Click ANDROID to download from Google Play and click APP STORE if you are an iPhone user like myself!
- Add Social Media Links and Contact info. Make sure the people who are taking their time to sign up have a way to reach you since there is a great possibility this person won’t be seeing you in person. Have your socials updated and connected – it helps you in the end, trust me. When you make a Tournament Organizer profile on Battlefy (because that’s what YOU are now!) you want to make sure that you have every social media link filled in properly and connected to the correct pages. Personally, I have seen tournament organizers promoting events but their social media links are wrong and sometimes NOT EVEN ACTIVE!
- Adjust your Tournament settings. This is where you can preset A LOT of information. To not get too wordy, I’ll keep it short and in order of succession: Here is where you pick the REGION the tournament is being hosted in, how many registrants are allowed, player registration field info and what platform the tournament is being played on (PS4, Switch etc.)
So now that you and your compadres have decided to duke it out in this tournament it’s time to publish and make your event live for sign-ups! When setting up your tournament, Battlefy is very user-friendly and will basically do everything but type for you. It is a really simple setup once you get inside there and get your hands on it. The flow of pictures I have laid out are the last steps when setting up the final steps of your event!
Once you have everything in order you are now ready to HOST your own Gaming tournament! You will be issued an invite link to send out to people in order to sign up! This can be useful in email campaigns or on social media! If you are a digital person, then you know that social media is the catalyst to your content! Use those pages and accounts to get your event some shine and more sign-ups!
I’ve done so many different events that now I’m in the space of sponsorship. So what that entails is, in the community of gamers I have grown with I am now being approached with offers to sponsor my leagues with upwards of $500 per season. You can do it if I can do it. We live in the same town, right community members?
If you grind..then you can SHINE!
