TOURNAMENTSUITE
TOURNAMENTSUITE
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Participants

Registration Approval & the Reserve Bench

How the pending → approved workflow, payment gates, and the reserve bench work together to build your final tournament roster.

When someone registers, their entry moves through a short lifecycle before it counts toward your bracket: Pending (awaiting your review), then Approved or Rejected. If you'd rather skip manual review, turn on Auto-approve registrations in the registration card's Settings tab and every incoming registration is approved the moment it's submitted. For the full approve/reject workflow, see Manage Registrations.

This page covers what happens after that: the payment gate on paid tournaments, how your bracket is now sized to approved entrants only, the reserve bench that holds any surplus, and the self-service and substitution options available around a confirmed registration.

The payment gate on paid tournaments

If your tournament charges an entry fee, a new registration doesn't go straight to Pending. It first sits in a Pending Payment state until the participant completes payment. Only once payment clears does it move into the regular Pending queue for your review (or straight to Approved, if auto-approve is on). An unpaid registration isn't visible as something to act on in your Registrations list — it's genuinely blocked on the participant completing checkout.

Brackets are sized to your approved roster, not your bracket size field

A tournament's bracket size (the Size field on the General settings tab) is a ceiling, not a target — your bracket is built from whoever is actually approved when you generate it, not padded out to that ceiling with empty slots.

This matters most for single-elimination and double-elimination brackets, because a clean knockout tree needs a power-of-two number of entrants (8, 16, 32, and so on) with no byes. If your approved count isn't already a power of two, the bracket is sized down to the largest power of two that fits, and the lowest-seeded surplus entrants are held back on the reserve bench instead of receiving a bye. For example: 9 approved entrants produce an 8-player bracket with 1 held in reserve; 12 approved produce an 8-player bracket with 4 in reserve; 16 approved fill the bracket exactly with none reserved.

Round robin, Swiss, and group-stage tournaments don't have this constraint — every approved entrant plays, and nothing is moved to reserve for sizing reasons alone.

The reserve bench

The reserve bench (labelled Beklemede in some views) holds two kinds of entries side by side: participants you've explicitly waitlisted because registration was full, and the surplus entrants your bracket sizing reserved automatically. Both use the same mechanism — a reserved entry keeps its registration and its place in line, it's just excluded from the active roster for now.

  • A reserved participant's registration stays intact; they aren't rejected or removed, and they're not counted toward your approved roster numbers (headline participant counts, check-in eligibility, and the public participant list all reflect approved entrants only).
  • On the participant-facing tournament page, reserved entrants appear in their own group alongside the main roster, rather than being hidden entirely.

Managing the reserve bench:

  1. Open the Waitlist tab (on the tournament's Registration Management card, or the Beklemede view in Participants).
  2. To hold back a participant yourself — pending or already approved — move them to reserve. This is useful if you need to free a roster slot for someone else without rejecting the participant outright.
  3. To bring a reserved entrant into the active roster, promote them. Promotion is capacity-checked: if your approved roster is already full, the promotion is blocked until you free a slot (for example, by removing or moving another participant to reserve first).
  4. Promotions and moves to reserve can be done one at a time from this tab.

Reserve-bench participants who are never promoted simply don't seed the bracket — they aren't automatically converted into byes or forfeits.

Letting participants cancel or edit their own registration

Two separate options control what a participant can do to their own confirmed registration without contacting you:

  • Self-cancel — the participant withdraws their own registration. This is blocked once they've checked in.
  • Self-edit — the participant updates details on their own registration, such as their team name or their answers to your custom fields.

Both are off by default for a tournament, and each is controlled independently — enabling one doesn't enable the other. These aren't yet exposed as switches in the tournament dashboard; if you want either enabled for a specific tournament, this currently has to be turned on for you rather than toggled from a settings page. When an option is off, a participant who tries to cancel or edit their registration from the player-facing site sees a message that the action isn't available for that tournament.

Substituting a participant

If you expect roster changes — a player dropping out, a team swapping in a stand-in — turn on Allow Substitutions under Settings → Participant for the tournament. By default this is off, which blocks any substitution attempt outright. There's a separate option to allow substitutions to continue once the tournament is already in progress, rather than only before it starts.

For team tournaments, a team's own captain can perform a substitution themselves (swapping one roster member for another) as long as the team hasn't already used up its allotted number of substitutions — organizers and admins aren't the only ones who can act here. For individual tournaments, replacing the registered participant with a substitute is an organizer/admin action. Either way, the incoming substitute can't already be registered elsewhere in the same tournament, and a record of who was swapped in and out is kept against the registration.

What happens next

  • Run check-in once your approved roster (minus anyone still on the reserve bench) is where you want it — only approved participants are eligible to check in.
  • Review the full approve/reject workflow, auto-approve, and the general waitlist toggle in Manage Registrations.
  • Configure registration windows, fees, and the waitlist option itself in Registration Settings.

On this page

The payment gate on paid tournamentsBrackets are sized to your approved roster, not your bracket size fieldThe reserve benchLetting participants cancel or edit their own registrationSubstituting a participantWhat happens next