Participants, groups, and stages

Participants

On Players (/dashboard/players) there are three ways to add someone:

• Create Player — first name, last name, email (optional), team assignment.
• Invite Player — same fields, but email is required here: the person gets a real invitation instead of being added directly.
• Import — add several players at once.

The list shows status pills: Invited (not accepted yet), Unconfirmed (has a TAP-ID, but hasn’t confirmed this email address), TAP ID (linked account).

You form teams on Teams (/dashboard/teams) from the players you’ve already added, if your discipline is played in teams.

Stages

The actual tournament structure — group stage, knockout, double elimination, Swiss, league — is set up on Stages (/dashboard/stages), not when you create the tournament.

1. “Add stage” → pick a stage type: Group Stage, Single Elimination, Double Elimination, Loser Bracket, Swiss System, League Table.
2. Configure type-specific options — e.g. which earlier stage feeds a bracket, the grand-final advantage for double elimination, the number of rounds for Swiss.
3. Assign participants (by drag, or “Seed from standings” if an earlier stage already has a table).
4. “Generate games” / “Generate bracket” / “Generate round N” (Swiss) creates the actual matches.

Note

If an earlier stage still has unfinished games, TAP asks for confirmation once before generating the next one — unless that stage runs in parallel (see below).

For a single extra match — a showmatch, a replay — there’s the “Single match” button in the Stages toolbar: it creates one game without touching the stage’s generator or bracket.

A bracket that stops before the final

A knockout bracket normally plays down to one winner. “How many come out” in the stage’s setup step changes that: pick 2, and the bracket stops after the semi-finals — no final is played, and two competitors come out of it.

That is what a promotion play-off looks like: four teams enter, two go up. Point an entry rule at places 1–2 of that stage (see Leagues and seasons) and both move on together, without a match that decides something nobody asked about.

The number does not have to be a power of two. Eight entrants can leave three standing: the bracket plays its four quarter-finals, then a single play-off match, and the two best seeds go through without playing it. The rule is simply that every match knocks one competitor out — so “eight in, three out” costs exactly five matches, and the setup step does that arithmetic for you as you type.

• The bracket still has to play at least its first round, so it cannot leave more standing than that round produces. Eight entrants can leave up to four.
• Where the byes fall is not a choice: they go to the best seeds, so the top of the bracket is never asked to play a match the bottom is spared.
• The stage table orders those survivors by seed, not by wins — somebody who walked through has one win fewer than somebody who played the play-off, and an entry rule reading “places 1–3” would otherwise take them in reverse.
• A cut bracket has no 3rd place match, so that checkbox disappears when you pick anything above 1.
• Whoever loses the last round played is available to a Loser Bracket stage as usual: add one, set its source to this bracket, and the eliminated competitors can play for a place.
• The stage counts as finished as soon as its last game is played, so entry rules and stage-completion webhooks fire normally.

Giving the losers somewhere to go

A stage’s line-up comes from another stage’s table — “Feeds from” in the setup step. Next to it, “from place” and “how many” pick a window out of that table rather than always taking the top.

Leave “from place” blank and it means what it always did: the best ones, from the top. Set it to 3 with 4 alongside and the stage takes places 3–6 — which is how a relegation round is expressed. Both can hang off the same source: one stage takes places 1–2 and goes up, another takes 3–6 and plays to stay.

The line under the fields says back what the numbers select, so 3 and 4 reads as “Places 3–6.” before you save it.

Stages that run in parallel

A stage can be marked “Run in parallel” when you create or edit it. It then runs alongside the stage before it rather than after: it does not wait for that stage to finish, and the two appear stacked in the pipeline at the top of the page, marked ∥.

Parallel stages share the courts. When you distribute one stage’s games across courts, the slots its parallel neighbours already occupy stay free, and the grid names whoever is holding them instead of showing them as free. Two matches on the same court at the same time is the one thing “at the same time” cannot mean — if you drag a game into an occupied slot anyway, it is flagged in red, the same as a participant scheduled twice in one round.