5 things you have to think about when running a gaming tournament

I’m running a small-scale gaming tournament for the Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme Vs: Full Boost (EXVSFB) Singaporean community this coming Saturday, and this post is as much an informative piece for you guys as it is a memo to myself to not mess anything up.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you increase tournament participation, decrease hiccup occurrences, and gain a six-pack in just two weeks with some simple exercises.

1. What’s my target number of participants?

This is always the first thing on an organizer’s mind: how many people are going to show up? The reason this is the first item on this list is simply that if you can’t draw in a reasonable number of participants, there’s really no point running a tournament. More importantly, being the organizer of a tournament with a high number of participants is something you’d definitely want to put on your résumé, or casually mention in a conversation with a member of the opposite sex.

Rallying up a good number of participants for team-based games such as EXVSFB tends to be extra difficult, thanks to the fact that players need a group of friends to join with them.

2. Where will I be holding the tournament?

As they say in real estate: ‘location, location, location.’ Tourney-goers don’t want to travel too far to take part in a tournament, and it’s your job to make sure they don’t have to. You also have to look into whether the potential venue has all the equipment you need, which may include the necessary consoles or PCs, a setup that will let you do livestreaming, and a sound system so you don’t have to shout yourself hoarse. Also, you have to make sure your venue is big enough to house all the tournament participants, plus their girlfriends who come to support them. Speaking from experience, the latter is not a particularly large number of people, but I think my tournament participants would want me to be optimistic on their behalves.

Garena Stadium, located in Bugis+, Singapore, is a great place for holding League of Legends tournaments.

3. What are the prizes I’ll be distributing?

Prizes are directly related to the hype surrounding a tournament, as demonstrated by Valve in the organization of The International, where they gave out approximately $2.7 million in total prize money. On the other end of the spectrum, our community looks a little bit more like a bunch of sorry scavengers who forage for small-time prizes and donations from sponsors or members of the community, but we do a pretty good job of lying to ourselves that it’s good enough, so we tend to get by just fine.

4. What will be the tournament format?