Tournaments & Brackets

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

Finding tournaments

The Tournaments page leads with what is happening now:

• Next LAN: the soonest upcoming tournament in the LAN category, as a strip (or the full card when nothing is live).
• Live: running tournaments, the first one featured.
• Upcoming: an agenda of everything still to come, grouped by month.
• Recent results: finished tournaments, with See all.

Any tournament can be opened in a Quick look sheet without leaving the list: registration rules, check-in window, map pool, and final standings, with the buttons to register or join as a free agent.

Search by name and narrow the list by Status (All, Live, Open, Upcoming, Finished). Filters adds a Date range, Category, and Only tournaments I organize, which replaces the old organizer management page.

Tournament cards know when you are already in: Registered, Joined as a free agent, or Free agent · waitlisted. Tournaments that are open for registration also appear on the Play page.

The tournament page

The header carries the banner, logo, status, match type, categories, start time, location, format, a Homepage link, and the organizers. Its buttons are Join Tournament while registration is open, Chat Room, and, for organizers, Manage with the Tournament status menu beside it.

Below it, five tabs:

Tab	What it shows
Overview	Prize pool, teams, format, start, and location at a glance; the podium, MVP, and stage standings; prizes; About; Match Settings
Bracket	Every stage's bracket (shown once stages exist, or to organizers)
Matches	Every match in the tournament as a full row, filtered Live, Upcoming, Results, or All
Teams	My Team, the Roster of entered teams (All, Ready, Needs Players), and the Free Agents pool
Stats	The tournament's Player leaderboard

Matches and Stats appear once the tournament is live. Above the tabs, the page shows whatever needs your attention first: an invite to accept, the entry requirements you do or don't meet, and the check-in panel. An owner with several teams entered switches between them there, and the check-in panel and My Team follow the one picked.

Tournament chat

Entrants and organizers share a Chat Room for the tournament, from setup through the last match. It stays open for 7 days after the tournament finishes, marked Ended · closes in the time left, so teams can wrap up.

Running a tournament

Creating a tournament is a wizard: Information, Location, Registration, Match Options, and Prizes. It then drops you into Stages, which decide the format and the bracket.

After that, everything lives in the Manage console on the tournament page:

Section	What you set
Details & branding	Logo, banner, name, homepage, description, start date, categories, and location
Registration	Who can register, entry requirements, invite only, and check-in
Teams & invites	Add Team, direct Invites, and invite Links; the check-in review
Stages	The stages that make up the bracket
Match rules	Match type, map pool, veto, region, TV delay, scheduling, and substitutes
Prizes & awards	Prize places, the award for each placement, and manual awards
Organizers	Co-organizers and organizer teams
Discord	Notifications and voice channels

The Tournament status menu takes it through its lifecycle: Open Registration, Close Registration, Start Tournament, Pause Tournament, Resume Tournament, Reset to Setup, Cancel Tournament, and Delete Tournament. An action that can't run yet says why, for example that the start time has passed, the bracket is full, or there is no stage.

A tournament without check-in that is still open for registration at its start time starts on its own then, as long as it has enough teams: registration closes, free agents are drafted, and the bracket is seeded. One left open more than 15 minutes past its start waits for an organizer to start it.

Match rules also holds:

• Auto Start: schedule tournament matches automatically, or leave each one for an organizer to schedule.
• Negotiated Scheduling: teams agree their own match times instead, see Negotiated match times.
• Allow Substitutes: let teams roster and field substitutes beyond the starting lineup. It can't be turned off once registration has closed.
• Map pool and match options: veto, region (single region or region veto), and a TV delay (0–120s) for broadcasts. A change here, such as moving the tournament to another region, reaches every stage and every match that hasn't started yet, unless a stage or match was given its own value.

Teams can self-register while registration is open, or organizers can add them with Add Team, as many as they need. Organizations can enter their own teams, and co-organizers can be added as organizer teams rather than one person at a time. A team owner can enter several of their teams in the same tournament, but a player can be on only one roster in it.

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.

Banner and logo

The logo and banner uploads open a crop editor with a Where it shows preview: the banner as it appears on the tournament page (desktop and phone), the live banner, cards, the quick look, list thumbnails, and the Next LAN strip; the logo at page-header, card, and small sizes. A dashed Safe zone marks where text and logos survive every crop. The editor warns when an image is too small or zoomed past its resolution, and logos can use Remove background. Banners are saved at 2400 × 800 (3:1).

Presenting the event

• Prize pool with per-placement distribution (drag to reorder; places renumber automatically, and labels can be overridden).
• Location: the venue or city, found by address search.
• Categories: LAN, Location Event, Online Event, or League.

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

Registration and join rules

Who can register? decides how the field is built:

Option	How teams form
Teams only	Captains register an existing team. The default.
Free Agents	Players sign up alone and are drafted into balanced teams when registration closes.
Teams + Free Agents	Both. Leftover free agents are drafted into extra teams alongside registered ones.

Entry requirements are checked against every player being added, not just whoever clicks, so a captain can't roster an ineligible teammate:

• Minimum role: the lowest role a player needs.
• Rank range: a Min ELO and/or Max ELO. The rating used matches the format: Wingman for 2-player lineups, Rush for 3, Competitive otherwise, and the current season's rating when seasons are on. A player with no rating yet counts as 5000.
• Invite only: registration is closed to the public. Organizers send Invites to a team or a player, or generate invite Links that expire after a set time (30 minutes up to 7 days, or never), cap their uses (1 to 100, or no limit), and can be revoked. Each link lists Who used it.

Players see the requirements on the tournament page as Entry requirements, each marked met or not met, and someone arriving from an invite link gets a You have an invite prompt to Accept invite first.

No-shows can be sanctioned

A player with an active tournament sanction can't enter new tournaments. By default, missing three required check-ins within 30 days bars a player from tournaments for 7 days. Admins tune this under Tournament No-Show in Settings → Application → Sanctions. The check runs on the way in only, so a player already in a running bracket keeps their place.

Check-in

Turn on Require check-in and teams must confirm they're attending before the bracket is seeded.

• Who checks in?: Captains (the captain, or a team admin who plays on the team, confirms for the whole team), Every player (the team is in once a full starting lineup confirms; substitutes don't have to), or Organizer only (players can't check themselves in; organizers Mark present).
• Window opens: 15–240 minutes before start (default 60).
• Window closes: 5–60 minutes before start (default 15). The window always stays open at least 5 minutes.

A timeline previews the window against the start time. Once the window opens, the start time and both offsets lock, because teams are already acting on that schedule.

A team is checked in by someone who plays on it, never by an owner managing it from outside, so an owner with several teams entered leaves each one's check-in to its captain. Everyone else, including an owner who doesn't play on the team, sees Waiting for Alex to check in. A team's captain is always someone on its tournament roster: if the team's own captain isn't on it, the captaincy goes to the owner when they play, otherwise a team admin, otherwise a starter. Organizers can mark any team present.

A team that registers during the window is checked in automatically when whoever registers it could check it in (its captain or a team admin who plays on it), or when an organizer adds it.

Teams that still need to check in get a notification when the window opens and a reminder 5 minutes before it closes, and a countdown sits at the top of the tournament page.

When the window closes:

• If every team checked in, registration closes and the bracket is seeded.
• If any team missed it, the tournament is held. Organizers see N teams missed check-in with three choices: Re-admit a team, Continue without them, or Extend check-in by 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, which re-notifies the missing teams.

A held tournament never stalls: if nobody acts, it continues on its own at its start time with whoever checked in. No-shows are never deleted: a team that missed check-in keeps its roster and can be re-admitted any time before the tournament goes live.

Free agents check in too. One who hasn't confirmed by the cutoff is moved to the waitlist and isn't drafted.

Free agents

A player without a team signs up alone with Sign up (or As a free agent when the tournament takes both). The Free Agents pool on the Teams tab lists everyone still waiting with their 5Stack, Premier, and FACEIT ranks.

When registration closes, the pool is drafted into teams of the tournament's lineup size:

• Who plays is sign-up order. Everyone past the last full team is waitlisted, so a late sign-up can't take the slot of someone who registered hours earlier.
• Which team is ELO. The strongest player goes first onto the team with the lowest running total, so teams come out balanced.
• Drafted teams are numbered (Team 5, Team 6, …) after the teams already entered, and the highest-rated player stands in as owner and captain. If they leave, both roles pass to the next highest-rated teammate.

Players who sign up after the draft join the waitlist and are placed straight into any drafted team that is short, and a seat that opens on a drafted team is refilled from the waitlist the same way.

A player is on a team or in the pool, never both. Registering or joining a team takes you out of the pool. You can leave with Leave pool, but once you've been drafted onto a team, only while registration is still open.

Recruiting free agents

While registration is open and their roster has an open seat, a team's owner, captain, or roster admins can Invite anyone in the pool. The free agent joins only if they accept. Free agents are also tagged Free agent in the roster's player search.

Managing the pool

Organizers can Add Free Agent and Remove players while registration is open or during check-in review, and see a forecast of the draft: N free agents → T teams of S, W waitlisted. Draft teams runs the draft early; it runs once, so drafting again does nothing until the drafted teams are removed.

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.

Every stage plays the tournament's map pool, and a best-of can't be longer than the pool has maps.

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.

What locks when

The bracket is drawn from the stages when registration closes (or earlier, as soon as a team or match lands in a bracket). From then on:

• A stage's type, teams, and groups are locked. Best-of can still change.
• A stage's match settings are locked.
• The tournament's match type and map pool are locked.

To change any of these, reset the tournament to setup.

Brackets

The bracket updates live as matches finish. You can zoom and fit it to the screen, switch between split and page-scroll views, hide finished rounds, go fullscreen, and Follow a team to dim every match it isn't in. Organizers can schedule matches straight from the bracket, and 5Stack estimates when each round is likely to be reachable so schedules stay realistic.

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

Tournament matches can't be deleted from the match page. A bracket slot whose match was deleted earlier shows Recreate Match, which gives the two teams a new match and takes the team that advanced back out of the next round until it's played. It isn't offered once the next round has started.

There's also a public, embeddable bracket you can drop into a stream or website via an iframe, from Share or Popout. It updates in real time and shows the tournament name, stage, teams, and seeds. It can follow the Current stage, stay on a Specific stage, or Cycle all stages on a timer, highlighting live matches, which makes it a ready-made overlay for broadcasts and venue signage.

Negotiated match times

With Negotiated Scheduling on, teams agree their own match times on the bracket instead of matches starting automatically. Each bracket card with two teams gets a Schedule control:

• A team's owner, captains, and roster admins can Propose time.
• The other side can Accept, Counter with a different time, or Decline. Past proposals stay under History.
• A time must fall inside the round's scheduling window when the stage has one, otherwise within the next two weeks.
• A match can be renegotiated until it goes live.

League matches are scheduled the same way from the league's own schedule.

Results, MVP, and stats

Once the tournament is live, the Overview shows each stage's standings, marked LIVE · PROVISIONAL until it finishes. When it finishes, the podium and the MVP join them.

The podium is 1st, 2nd, and 3rd from the last stage, with the players who played for each team, and it shows whether or not the tournament hands out awards (headed Standings instead of Awards when it doesn't). A single-elimination final without a third-place match puts both semifinal losers on 3rd, and a last stage played in several groups has no podium. The final stage's standings, a team's placement badge, the tournament's cards, and its Quick look follow the same placements, so a shared 3rd reads 3rd for both teams everywhere.

Hover the MVP label for How the MVP is chosen: the player on the winning team with the highest average impact across every match of the tournament. Impact rates each match from 0.80 to 1.20, from (kills + assists) / deaths compared to the team and share of the team's damage. The card shows the MVP's average impact, matches played, and the next best player. An MVP the organizers picked reads Picked by the organizers, and its card shows their note and who the automatic pick was. Any other awards granted in the tournament are listed under the MVP.

The Stats tab ranks every player in the tournament in a Player leaderboard: Rating, ADR, kills, deaths, assists, K/D, and HS%, with totals for matches, rounds, players, and the top rating. It fills in as matches finish.

Picking the MVP

The MVP is picked automatically when the tournament finishes, and organizers can change it under Manage → Prizes & awards → Tournament MVP. Change MVP (or Pick MVP when there is none) lists the winning team's players who played, best average impact first, with the automatic pick marked Suggested. Add an optional note of up to 140 characters and Confirm MVP: the new MVP gets the award and its notification, and the player it replaces loses the MVP award but keeps their 1st place medal.

• I'll pick the MVP myself stops the automatic pick for this tournament: it has no MVP until an organizer picks one. Turned on after the finish, it keeps the MVP already given.
• Organizers can't pick themselves; an administrator can.
• History lists every MVP the tournament has had, and who picked each.
• There is only an MVP once the tournament has finished and when awards are on, and it is picked here rather than granted under Manual Awards.

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.

Awards

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

Placement medals go to the placing team's players who actually played in the tournament, not to everyone on its roster. A match that finished with nothing recorded for the team, such as a result set by hand after a crash, counts everyone in its lineup; a forfeit counts nobody, and a team whose every match was a forfeit keeps everyone. When both semifinal losers share 3rd, no Third Place award is handed out automatically; an organizer can grant one by hand.

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 on the Awards page under Administration, where awards can also be granted to a player or team by hand — no tournament required. A hand-granted 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place award for a tournament takes that placement on its podium. Two role settings in Settings → Application → Awards, Manage Awards Role and Grant Awards Role, control who can author awards and who can grant them; tournament organizers can always grant awards inside their own tournament under Manual Awards.