Everything you need to know to run a tournament with StatDek — no technical background required.
StatDek is a tool for running tournaments — think cornhole, horseshoes, pool, any bracket-style competitions or events where players face off in matches and you need to track who's winning. It handles three things at once:
You don't need to install anything. Everything runs in a web browser.
You can start running a tournament in seconds, with no sign-up required:
1234). This is how your tournament is identified — spectators use it to find your live view, and you can use it to look your tournament up later.That's it — you're ready to start adding players. Behind the scenes, StatDek quietly creates an anonymous session tied to your browser so you're recognized as the person in charge of this tournament (more on what that means in the Sign-In section below).
If only individual players show up and you need to form doubles (or larger) teams first, use the Team Builder — a separate tool linked right next to "Start New Tournament" on the Start page. It's meant to be used before you create your tournament: build your teams there first, then create the tournament and paste in the results.
Single List puts everyone in one pool and builds evenly sized teams straight down a shuffled list. A/B Pairing uses two separate lists instead — List A typically holding stronger or more experienced players and List B holding developing or newer players — and pairs one from each list together. This keeps teams balanced rather than risking a stacked roster from pure chance.
When the numbers don't divide evenly, the leftover player is paired with a placeholder called "Odd Man" rather than having a player left out. That's a real, addable team — it goes into your roster exactly as shown, and you swap "Odd Man" out for an actual player once one becomes available (for example, once someone's eliminated elsewhere and can join in).
Once you're happy with the generated teams, click "Copy Teams to Clipboard." This copies them in exactly the format the "Bulk Add" box on the setup page expects — one team per line. Head to the homepage, click "Start New Tournament," and paste directly into Bulk Add.
On your control panel, you'll fill in a few things before you publish the bracket:
Whatever you want to call it. Shows up everywhere: spectator view, results page, the public tournament list. A real name is required — the "Generate & Publish Bracket" button stays dimmed and won't proceed until you've entered one; a blank field or the default placeholder name isn't enough.
Right under the name field, you'll set a password for this tournament — also required before you can generate the bracket, and there's no length limit. This exists for one specific situation: if the browser you're running the tournament from closes unexpectedly (a crash, a dead battery, a borrowed device) and you need to pick it back up somewhere else, the password is what proves you're the actual director rather than just anyone who happens to have the tournament's link.
It's set once, at setup, and can't be changed from this field afterward — the field locks once a password exists. Pro Tip: use the same password for every tournament you create.
See Choosing a Format below.
Add players one at a time with the "➕ Add Player/Team" button, or paste a whole list at once with "📋 Bulk Add" (one name per line — handy if you're copying from a sign-up sheet, or pasting teams from the Team Builder). You can tap any player afterward to edit their name or remove them.
Each player also has an optional Notes field — a free-text scratchpad. Use it for anything worth remembering: stats, achievements, whatever matters to your event (for horseshoes, that might be ringers and sixpacks). Whatever you type here shows up later on the results page.
Add the names of the physical courts or pits matches will be played on (e.g. "Court 1," "Pit A"). You'll assign matches to these once the tournament starts.
Once your roster and venues are set, click "Generate & Publish Bracket." This builds the full match structure and makes it visible to spectators.
StatDek supports three tournament formats. In plain terms:
Lose once, you're out. The simplest and fastest format. Best for large groups with limited time.
Lose once, you drop to a second "losers bracket" and keep playing; lose twice, you're out. This means one bad match doesn't end your day, and it usually produces a fairer final ranking — at the cost of taking longer and needing more courts.
Instead of a single elimination tree, every player plays a fixed number of rounds (usually calculated automatically based on how many players you have), and each round pairs players with others who have a similar record so far — winners tend to face winners, and so on. There's no bracket tree to look at; instead, everyone is ranked on a standings table by points (and a tiebreak score called Buchholz, which rewards players who faced tougher opponents). Swiss is a good fit when you have a lot of players and limited time, since everyone keeps playing regardless of an early loss, and it doesn't require a bracket size that's a clean power of two.
Not sure which to pick? Single elimination for a quick, casual event; double elimination if you want results to feel more "earned"; Swiss if you have a big group and want everyone to get a full day of matches regardless of one bad round.
For Single and Double Elimination, you also choose how players are placed into the bracket. This doesn't apply to Swiss, since it pairs players fresh each round based on results rather than a fixed starting bracket.
Players are shuffled into the bracket with no ranking involved — a fair, honest draw. Byes are still spread out evenly so no one player gets an unlucky stack of free rounds.
You rank players by strength, and StatDek places them so your #1 seed faces your weakest seed, #2 faces the next-weakest, and so on — the standard tournament approach that keeps your top seeds apart for as long as possible, so they don't knock each other out early.
Also uses your ranked seed numbers, but pairs them straight down the list instead — #1 vs #2, #3 vs #4, and so on — with any byes trailing at the very end. Use this when you want full, direct control over exactly who plays whom in the first round.
When you pick Seeded or Manual, a seed-number field appears next to each player. Click "🔢 Auto-Number by Current Order" to quickly assign 1 through however many players you have, then adjust individual numbers as needed. Every player needs a unique number with no gaps before you can generate the bracket — StatDek will tell you clearly if something doesn't add up.
Once the bracket is published, your control panel becomes a live operations screen.
Shows every match, filterable by Ready / Active / Paused. A match is "Ready" once both players are known but hasn't been assigned a court yet. Declaring a winner is only possible from the Active tab specifically — the other tabs will remind you of this if you're browsing them.
From the "Ready" tab StatDek will assign the next available match to a random available court. Or you can find an open court in the Venues list, and click "Draw Match." This pulls the next match in line and assigns it there — and pops up an on-screen announcement with the matchup and court, so you can call it out to the room. Matches only become eligible to record a winner for once they're actually assigned to a court ("Active") — this stops a result from accidentally being recorded before a match has actually started.
Click the winning player's name on an active match. You'll get a confirmation popup before anything is saved — a safety check in case you tap the wrong name. The popup also has two optional score fields, labeled with the actual players' names — fill them in if you're tracking the final score, or leave them blank if you're not. Whatever you enter (or skip) is final at confirmation; there's no way to add or edit a score afterward. Confirm, and the bracket (or Swiss standings) updates instantly for everyone watching.
The Dashboard tab is the first thing you see on your control panel — an overview of the tournament as a whole, including a Live Standings card that ranks every player as the tournament progresses. For Swiss, that's the points-and-Buchholz table described below. For Single and Double Elimination, it ranks players by how far they've actually advanced in the bracket — not simply by win count, since in double elimination a player working their way back through the losers bracket can rack up more individual wins than the eventual champion did. Champion and runner-up are always determined by who actually won and lost the final, with everyone else ranked by the round they were eliminated in.
The "↩ Undo Last Action" button reverses your most recent result. It's grayed out when there's nothing to undo.
Once every match in the current round is complete, StatDek automatically generates the next round's pairings — you don't need to click anything to advance the round. A live standings table shows everyone's current ranking as you go.
A status indicator in the header shows whether you're currently online, and a "pending sync" counter appears if any of your actions haven't confirmed yet. You can keep recording results even with no connection — nothing waits on the network to update your own screen — and everything you did while offline syncs automatically the moment you're back online.
Only one screen can actively control a tournament at once — if you open the same tournament on a second device (say, your phone, while your laptop is already running it), that second screen will show a banner explaining the tournament is already active elsewhere, with a "Take Over Control" button. Taking over immediately locks the first screen out of making further changes, so only use it if you actually mean to switch which device is in charge. If a screen genuinely closes, crashes, or loses its connection for good, the lock releases on its own — you won't ever be permanently stuck out of your own tournament.
Both you and your spectators (StatDek Live) can search for any player by name — a search box appears on your Dashboard, and spectators have the same on their live view (desktop and mobile alike). Tap a name — or a search result — to open that player's profile, which shows:
This is meant to answer the question every player and spectator eventually asks — "when do I play next, and against who?" — without needing to track down the director or squint at the bracket.
If a team isn't immediately available for a match that's just been drawn — or one that's already underway — you don't have to leave it stuck occupying a court.
When you draw a match, the announcement popup includes a "⏸ Pause" option alongside the normal confirmation, for exactly this situation. An already-active match can also be paused directly from its card in the Match Queue. Pausing frees up that court immediately for another match, without losing the pairing or any progress — it just sits, clearly marked, under the Paused filter tab until you're ready for it.
Click "▶ Resume Match" on a paused match whenever the team is ready. If a court happens to be open right then, StatDek assigns it automatically and shows the same announcement popup as a fresh draw. If every court is busy at that moment, it goes back into the normal ready queue and gets drawn the usual way once something frees up.
Need to tell everyone something — a rain delay, a lunch break, a schedule change? Type a message into the "Message Spectators" box and click "Send to Spectators." It appears as a banner spectators have to actively dismiss before they can keep watching, so it won't get missed. Click "Clear" to take it down.
Every StatDek Live tournament has a spectator link — a read-only live view anyone can open, no account needed. You'll find it on your control panel, along with a QR code you can display or print at the venue so people can scan it with their phone instead of typing a URL. The QR code specifically opens the mobile-optimized view described in the next section — the direct spectator link on your control panel opens the desktop layout described below.
The desktop spectator view shows three columns (matches currently being played, matches coming up next, and completed matches), plus either a full bracket tree (single/double elimination) or a live standings table (Swiss). Spectators also have their own "Share" button to pull up a QR code for the page they're currently looking at.
When the tournament ends, everyone watching — director and spectators alike — sees a congratulations popup naming the champion. Once a tournament is complete, the spectator page automatically stops its live connection, since there's nothing further to update.
Scanning the director's QR code specifically opens a dedicated mobile experience, purpose-built for a smaller screen rather than a shrunk-down version of the desktop layout — this is different from the spectator link itself (or a spectator's own "Share" QR code), both of which open the desktop layout described above even when viewed on a phone. The mobile view is organized around five tabs along the bottom:
Tapping any player's name anywhere in the mobile view — not just in Player Search — opens their full profile, exactly as described in Player Search & Profiles above.
If you're projecting the tournament on a TV or screen at the venue, TV Mode is its own dedicated page — click "📺 Open TV Display" from the spectator page, or point a TV/streaming box's browser directly at that link for the tournament. It's a large-format, no-scrolling layout built to be read from across a room rather than held in a hand, and it's entirely separate from the Tournament Director control panel — nothing on it is clickable or editable.
Three boxes across the top — Active Matches, Upcoming Matches, and Recent Results — each showing three at a time and paging through more automatically if there are extras. Below that sits the full tournament bracket (or the standings table, for Swiss), which does the same thing for larger brackets that don't fit on screen all at once.
Click "⛶ Enter Fullscreen" in the top corner to fill the whole screen — useful for an actual TV rather than a browser window. A matching "Exit Fullscreen" button stays at the bottom of the screen the whole time you're in it.
After a tournament wraps up (or even mid-event, if someone checks early), a results page is available summarizing everything:
There's a "🖨️ Print / Save PDF" button for a clean, printer-friendly version with none of the website chrome — handy for posting results or keeping a physical record.
The StatDek homepage keeps a public, searchable list of the 10 most recently created tournaments, sorted by creation date. Anyone can search it by name or Passkey ID and jump straight to results — this list isn't tied to who created what, it's just a public archive.
If you already know a tournament's 4-digit Passkey ID, you can also type it directly into the "Have a Tournament Passkey ID?" box on the homepage to jump straight to its results.
You never have to create an account — everything above works anonymously. But signing in (with a Google account, or an email and password) unlocks two things:
To sign in, click "Sign In" in the top corner of the homepage (or the My Tournaments page) and choose Google or email/password. Signing in doesn't disconnect you from tournaments you've already made — anything you created before signing in stays yours the moment you sign in, automatically.
This is the one part of StatDek that's worth understanding clearly, because it can be surprising if you don't know how it works.
The simple version: if you sign in with the same account consistently — meaning you sign in before or as you start creating tournaments on each device you use — everything you create will always be there for you, on any device, forever. Sign in on your laptop, sign in the same way weeks later on your tablet: your tournaments are all right there.
Where it can trip people up: if you create tournaments without signing in first, on more than one device, and only sign in on one of them afterward — the tournaments from the other device won't show up. Here's why, explained simply:
Think of each device as starting out with its own "temporary badge" the moment you visit the site — even if you never sign in, StatDek quietly gives you one so it can tell you apart from other directors. Any tournament you create is stamped with that badge. When you sign in with Google or email, StatDek permanently staples your account to whichever badge you were holding at that exact moment — turning your temporary badge into a permanent one. But it can only staple the badge you're currently holding. If you have a different temporary badge sitting on another device that you never signed in from, your account was never introduced to that badge — so StatDek has no way of knowing they belong to the same person.
In practice, this means:
This is worth knowing before you type anything into StatDek:
Full details are in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
You're viewing it in read-only mode, which means the browser session or account you're using isn't recognized as the one that created it. If it's your tournament and you're on a different device than you created it on, see the device section above — or, if you know the tournament's password, you'll see a prompt to enter it and take control from wherever you're currently viewing it.
If the browser you originally created it in is still available, you don't need the password at all — that session is still recognized as the owner. The password only matters when you're trying to take control from a different browser or device than the one that created it. If you've lost both the original browser and the password, there's currently no recovery path — worth writing the password down somewhere safe when you set it.
Once a bracket is published, the roster locks so it can never disagree with what's actually in play. You can still rename a player at any point — that updates everywhere automatically, including already-recorded results — but adding or removing someone requires regenerating the bracket, which erases results and starts over.
If you clicked past the warning popup, this can't be undone — that warning exists specifically to prevent this. Always double-check before confirming a bracket regeneration on a tournament that's already underway.
That's a "bye" — when the number of players doesn't divide evenly, some players get a free pass in the first round. This is normal and handled automatically.
You can keep working — recording winners, drawing matches — without interruption. Your screen doesn't wait on a connection to update. Everything queues locally and syncs automatically once you're back online, and a status indicator in the header shows you exactly what's happening rather than leaving it invisible.
Yes. Signing in is entirely optional. Everything described in this guide except "My Tournaments" and cross-device access works the moment you click "Start New Tournament," with no account at all.
Try a hard refresh of the page first (this fixes most display glitches). If a problem persists, reach out to us directly with your tournament's Passkey ID so we can look into it.