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Tournaments & Brackets ​

5Stack runs full tournaments end to end, registration, multi-stage brackets, scheduling, and awards, with a live bracket you can embed anywhere.

Running a tournament ​

An organizer can create a tournament with a name, description, and start time, then take it through its lifecycle: open registration, close registration, start, pause/resume, reset to setup, or cancel.

Along the way you can configure:

  • Auto-start at the scheduled time.
  • Map pool: use the default for the tournament type or a custom selection.
  • Match options: veto, region (single region or region veto), and a TV delay (0–120s) for broadcasts.
  • Registration: open/private signups, with team eligibility and a minimum number of players per team.
  • Discord notifications for tournament events.
  • Organizers: add co-organizers to help run the event.

Teams can self-register while registration is open, or organizers can add them manually. Organizations can also enter their own teams, and co-organizers can be added as organizer teams rather than one person at a time.

Once a bracket is seeded, a roster lock kicks in: a team's roster can't drop below the minimum lineup size, so a withdrawal can't silently break a live bracket. Swapping a player out means bringing a substitute in.

Presenting the event ​

A tournament page is built to be shown off, not just administered:

  • Banner image, description, and an external homepage link.
  • Prize pool with per-placement distribution (drag to reorder; places renumber automatically, and labels can be overridden).
  • Location: a physical venue with a map link, and a LAN designation for in-person events.
  • Categories for classifying the event.
  • Tabs for Overview, Teams, Information, Prizes, Match Options, Location, Organizers, Awards, and Discord.

Tournaments can also be grouped under an Event alongside other tournaments, teams, and players, with a shared medal table and media gallery.

Discord ​

Per-tournament Discord settings drive notifications for tournament events, and voice channels can be created automatically for tournament matches, players are moved into their team's channel when a match begins. See Discord Bot.

Stages & formats ​

A tournament is made of one or more stages run in sequence, each with its own format:

  • Single Elimination: knockout, with an optional third-place match between the two semifinal losers.
  • Double Elimination: winners and losers brackets, with an optional final map advantage: a map-point head start the winner-bracket team carries into the grand final.
  • Round Robin: everyone plays everyone, or cap it with max rounds so each team plays a set number of distinct opponents.
  • Swiss: in two flavours. By default it's Valve Swiss: advance at 3 wins, out at 3 losses. Turn on Swiss group (no elimination) for the ESEA-style variant, where teams pair by record for a fixed number of rounds and are ranked in one table without anyone being eliminated. The bracket renders by record pool (2-0, 1-1, 0-2) with live ADVANCED and ELIMINATED states.

Each stage can be configured with:

  • Groups: split a stage into parallel groups for a group stage.
  • Min / max teams for the stage.
  • Best-of: a default (BO1/BO3/BO5) for the stage, with optional per-round overrides.
  • Seeding: automatic or custom, with automatic bye handling.

Teams advance between stages automatically. A real configuration might run Round Robin (BO1, 32 teams) → Swiss (BO1, 16 teams) → Single Elimination (BO5, 4 teams), with each stage feeding the next.

Brackets ​

The bracket updates live as matches finish. Organizers can schedule matches straight from the bracket, zoom and fit it to the screen, switch between split and scrolling views, hide finished rounds, and go fullscreen.

Scheduling can be applied as a default across the bracket rather than match by match, and 5Stack estimates when each round is likely to be reachable so schedules stay realistic.

If a match went wrong, organizers can reset it. The reset shows a preview of exactly what it will undo, including any downstream matches that already advanced, before you commit.

There's also a public, embeddable bracket you can drop into a stream or website via an iframe. It updates in real time and shows the tournament name, stage, teams, and seeds. It can auto-cycle through stages and groups on a timer and highlight live matches, making it a ready-made overlay for broadcasts and venue signage.

Awards ​

Tournaments hand out an award for each of the top placements and an MVP, which count toward the leaderboard.

Each placement resolves to an award from the site-wide catalog. Leave it on the default and the tournament uses the built-in Champion / Runner-Up / Third Place / MVP awards; pick one of your own and winners receive that instead. Either way you can still override the name, silhouette, or artwork for this tournament only.

Administrators author the catalog under Settings → Awards, where awards can also be granted to a player or team by hand — no tournament required. Two role settings control who can author awards and who can grant them; tournament organizers can always grant awards inside their own tournament.