Tournament Admin Guide

Creating a tournament

From the sidebar, open Tournaments and click Create Tournament. The essential fields are:

• Name — the public name of your tournament.
• Start / end dates — drives the default age-calculation date and the schedule day layout.
• Registration open / close — competitors can't register outside this window.
• Currency & timezone — used for invoices, payments, and schedule times.
• Independent Rego Min Age — competitors younger than this need a parent account to register on their behalf.

New tournaments start in Draft status. Until you flip them to Published or Active, only you (and other admins) can see them.

Visibility (Public / Hidden) New

Every tournament has a Visibility setting in addition to its lifecycle status:

• Public — the tournament appears in the public directory at /tournaments for anyone, logged in or not, once it's Published or Active.
• Hidden — the tournament does not appear in the public directory. It stays reachable via its correct URL (/t/{id}/{slug}), but any wrong slug — or a bare /t/{id} — returns 404 so its existence isn't leaked.

Hidden tournaments are still shown in the My Tournaments section of the directory for:

• Admins of the tournament itself
• Any user who has a registration in that tournament

Use Hidden for private / invitational events, staging tournaments, or QA runs you don't want strangers stumbling across.

Automatic lock for TEST names

Any tournament whose name starts with TEST (case-insensitive, word-boundary — so TEST Dev, test-2026, and Test_Cup all count, but Testimonial Open does not) is forced to Hidden and can't be switched to Public until you rename it. This keeps internal testing tournaments off the public directory by default.

The Public option is disabled in the dropdown while the lock is active, and you'll see an explanation below the field. Rename the tournament to unlock; rename it back, and the lock re-applies on next save.

Events & Divisions

An event is a competition format (e.g. Kumite, Kata, Team Kata). A division is a bracket within an event, split by age / gender / rank / weight / height.

1. Open Events & Divisions from the Competition Setup section of the sidebar.
2. Click Add Event, give it a name, and pick a format (single elimination, single elimination with repechage, round robin, or multi-round elimination for Kata).
3. For each event, create the divisions that will be contested. Taikai auto-assigns registered competitors to the right division based on the split rules you set.
4. Kata events have their own Kata Settings link to configure scoring criteria, precision and final-score method (drop high & low, sum, or average).

Dojos & Allowed Dojos

Taikai keeps a global directory of dojos so a sensei's club carries across tournaments. Two controls matter here:

• Restrict dojos — when off (default), anyone from any dojo can enter. When on, only dojos you've explicitly approved can register.
• Allowed Dojos — the approval list. A dojo can apply to join via the public page, and you approve or reject from this screen.

Turning restrictions on is useful for invite-only events or league tournaments.

Registrations

Registrations come in two ways:

• Self-registration — a competitor (or their parent) creates an account, finds your tournament, and submits a registration. They get a confirmation email and, if fees are enabled, a payment link.
• Admin entry — you can add a competitor directly from Registrations → Add Entry. Taikai creates an account for them if needed and emails them a "You've been registered" welcome with a password-setup link.

From the registrations list you can mark entries as pending, confirmed, cancelled, or waitlisted, record manual cash payments, and view each registrant's event selections and division assignments.

Entry Fees & Payment Settings

Entry Fees (in the sidebar) chooses your fee model:

• Free — no fee.
• Flat — one amount per competitor regardless of how many events they enter (covers individual and team events alike; no separate per-team charge).
• Per event — first-event fee plus a smaller additional-event fee.
• In tiered or per-event modes, team events can have their own per-team fee charged once to the captain. (In flat mode, team events are already covered by each competitor's flat fee.)

Payment Settings configures how you get paid:

• Stripe — paste publishable key, secret key, and webhook secret. Competitors pay via Stripe Checkout; the webhook auto-confirms the registration.
• PayPal — client ID, secret, and mode (sandbox / live).
• Manual methods — free-text list (bank transfer, cash on the day, etc.) shown to competitors on the payment page.

Completed payments trigger a Payment Receipt email automatically (see Email Templates below).

Email Templates

Taikai sends a handful of transactional emails on your tournament's behalf. You can customise the subject and body for any of them from Tournament Details → Email Templates in the sidebar. The editable emails are:

• Admin-Entered Registration Welcome — sent when you manually add a competitor.
• Registration Confirmation — sent when a competitor self-registers.
• Payment Receipt — sent after a successful cash, Stripe, or PayPal payment.

Each template has a rich-text editor, a list of merge codes (click to insert at the cursor), a Reply-to field so replies land in your inbox, and a Send test to me button to preview against your own email before saving.

Every template has a Send this email toggle — untick it to stop that particular email from going out for your tournament. Overrides are per-tournament, so disabling (say) the payment receipt on one tournament doesn't affect any other.

Schedule

The Schedule screen is where you lay out rings and the order events run in:

1. Add a ring per mat you'll run concurrently.
2. Drag events into rings, or insert ceremonies / breaks between them.
3. Taikai tracks each entry's status (pending / active / completed) automatically as the draws progress, and records start / end times so you get a real timeline at the end of the day.

The Schedule Visibility toggle in Tournament Details controls whether competitors can see the schedule on the public side. You can also hide times-only if you want to publish the running order without committing to specific times.

Draws

Once registrations are in, open Draws to generate brackets. Taikai supports:

• Single elimination — classic knockout, with an optional 3rd-place match linked to the losing semi-finalists.
• Single elimination with repechage — WKF-style repechage with two groups and two 3rd place matches.
• Round robin — every competitor fights every other, standings computed live.
• Multi-round elimination — for Kata, with pools and a final round.

Draws are draft until you publish them. Only published draws appear on the public side. You can re-seed, swap competitors, and add byes from the bracket view.

Scoreboard (operator & public)

Each ring has two scoreboards:

• Operator (/tournament/{id}/operator/{mat}/ring-{n}) — your table-side controls: timer, scores, penalties, declare winner, load next match. Keyboard shortcuts: Q / A adjust Shiro's score, P / L adjust Aka's score, space starts/pauses the timer.
• Public display (/tournament/{id}/scoreboard/display/{mat}/{ring-slug}) — the fullscreen TV view. Scales cleanly at HD, FHD and 4K because everything is sized in vh/vw. When you declare a winner, the public display shows a 10-second "Winner" announcement before loading the next match.

Match settings (duration, buzzers, etc.) can only be changed before the first match in a division has been scored — after that, they lock so you can't accidentally change the duration mid-division.

Results

As matches complete, results populate automatically. You can view:

• Per-event standings for round-robin and Kata events.
• Final placings for elimination draws (1st, 2nd, and two 3rd-place competitors where applicable).
• A tournament-wide results page that competitors can view from the public side once you've finalised each draw.

Use Publish Results on each draw to release placings. Until then, results stay admin-only.