Items work competitively, but no one will ever use them en masse. Stop trying to use them.

You should use random stage selection for the first round if you can't create a good stage striking list.

To create a good stage striking list, you need 7 to 9 Starters. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQH_LUdkfkY

There will be people who only want 5 stages, or 3, and they will all be the same ****ing stage with slight variations. This is awful and they should be ashamed of themselves.

There will be people who hyper correct and say "let's use all stages to strike from". They don't know what they're talking about, ignore them.

You ban NOTHING without tournament evidence or extremely obvious visibility or near 100% world-wide acceptance of ban (see: Hyrule Temple, smash balls or items)

There will be people who want to ban something because it looks strong or has one strong instance. They will say "It's going to be a problem". Wait until it is. 99% of the time it isn't a problem. 0.5% of the time it is a problem, but only for the status quo who hate change. The other 0.5% of the time it actually is a problem, in which case you can ban the stage or technique.

Most of the time lost in tournaments isn't done in-game. It's done outside of the game. If anyone wants to lower the stock count or timer or the like, ignore them unless your tournament is super efficient.

Did you say "My tournament is super efficient" to the last one? IT ISN'T. Shame on you for lying.

Use Pools to seed players into more pools or into bracket to create a good tournament experience. When seeding pools, you should only seed the 1st seed for each pool (estimated), the rest should be randomized and separated by location only.

There will be people who want to seed all the way down to X, where X is who gets out of pools. These people are manipulating the bracket. If you can seed down to the number of people that would be in the bracket, just move straight on to bracket.

You don't know the exact rankings of any tournament, so don't pretend like you do. Seed ONLY THE FIRST SEED, if you seed anyone at all, for pools. Use pool results directly for bracket.

People will complain that they have a "hard pool". Ignore them. The majority of players cannot predict places 4-8 in a tournament and at least top 3 make it out of pools on average; logic dictates that if someone thinks they are in a "hard" pool they would at most be in 4th-8th place. The odds of randomly assigning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishers to the same pool randomly is incredibly small.

People like to complain. Ignore them most of the time. When you don't, implement changes post-tournament.

Pools are important not just for seeding, but for helping new players get more matches in. Don't short change them.

Do you run all Pools? You should. It saves a crap ton of time.

The optimal number of setups is N/2, where N is the number of players. You can figure out how many matches you can run this way. If you have N=30 players, optimal is 15 setups. If you have 10 setups, you can play 10 matches, leaving 5 matches waiting.

When you have matches unable to be played, tell those matches "You are ON DECK" and put them behind a setup. The moment that setup is free, they play there.

You don't know what rules to use? Use 3 stock and 8 minutes. This works regardless of game.

Don't have enough time to run 3 stock 8 minutes? Then you're a bad TO. Fix that instead of mangling a game's ruleset.

3 stock 8 minutes vs. 2 stock 6 minutes is a Smash 4 centric thing. You add ~1 hour of time to an entire event to run 3 stock, assuming stocks all take the average amount of time they do in 2 stock 6 minute games.

You want to encourage players to attend? Have pot bonuses for Out-of-state players and make events fun for new players to encourage locals to attend.

Don't have money for pot bonuses? Take 10% of the winnings out of each tournament and tack it onto a tournament every 4 or 5 months or so. If you have a tournament once a month and have 20 entrants on average, that's $20 per tournament. In 5 months you can add $100 extra for first place as a pot bonus, which will bring in all the regional talent you need.

Don't know how to make tournaments fun? RUN ONE GAME and make that game fun. Have singles, doubles, and then fun side events like draft crews, items on tournaments, banned stages tournaments, amiibo events, and other goofball things that you have time for.

DO NOT RUN MULTIPLE GAMES. In my 10 year stint of playing smash there has been a grand total of like 8 people I have met that can actually do this well. Most people can barely run one game.

The biggest thing to making an event work is to have setups. You find setups from players. Encourage people to bring setups by waiving venue fees for people who bring setups.

Don't just hope people bring setups. Individually reach out and get confirmation that people are attending and bringing a setup. If you get to a tournament you are hosting and you have a grand total of 5 setups and were needing 16, you should be incredibly shocked at how many people broke their word to you.

Ignore the East Coast unless you live there. They likely won't travel to your events more than once a year and you'll have maybe 1% of your playerbase that travels there once or more a year.

Ignore the West Coast unless you live there. They likely won't travel to your events more than once a year and you'll have maybe 1% of your playerbase that travels there once or more a year.

Ignore the Midwest unless you live there. They likely won't travel to your events more than once a year and you'll have maybe 1% of your playerbase that travels there once or more a year.

Ignore the South unless you live there. They likely won't travel to your events more than once a year and you'll have maybe 1% of your playerbase that travels there once or more a year.

You don't know if a stage should be legal or not? It should be. Encourage people to break it. Post the video on youtube of people laughing at how broken it is, collect ad revenue from video. Use ad revenue to pay whoever abuses the stage the most.

Only use one ban per set per player. Bans are used primarily for preference and for the crazy unique "this one matchup no this one stage can't be won ever" that don't effect the masses. If you allow multiple bans, you often hurt characters that rely on specific stage types and not the most common ones. This alters game balance. It's better to have 0 bans than 2.

A lot of things that are good for the game are hard to do. Do them anyway.

A lot of people will talk about "helping the scene" and "growing the community". You grow the community by having good events that are entertaining to those attending. The rest falls into place naturally.

Tell people where to park and where to eat. Give them specific times for when they can eat and when the venue closes.

If someone says "you should ban (X)", don't ask them "why?". Ask them to send you a PM with video evidence so you can review it. They won't. Because they don't have any.

People will always find a reason to complain. Remember that there is only one winner, which means N-1 people are going to have something to ***** about whether its legitimate or not.

Consistent events are better than one-off big events. Don't burn out.

TOs should make money. Charge a venue fee and pocket whatever you can. This encourages you to actually host more events, everyone wins. If you feel guilty, give out extra as prize money.

Drivers = attendees. Each driver can = 5 players. Reward drivers if you can with raffles and the like, or cut off their venue fee or something.

People say that they want evidence and data. They don't. Decide early on if you're going to fight bad ideas or not. If you aren't, give up and do whatever. If you are, do your own thing and collect data for those that will listen to it. Don't worry about those that don't care.

Tournaments are hard to run. If you don't know how a bracket works or how a pool works, look it up.

If you require a laptop to run a tournament, you aren't ready to run a tournament.

If you look at a bracket and say "Oh, these two shouldn't play each other first round" and those two players don't live together, team together, or were in the same pool, you're likely manipulating the bracket. Don't. Let them play.

This list isn't exhaustive. Just know that you're probably a bad TO and the majority of people are wrong about everything. The only thing you need to do is get setups, provide more matches, have less downtime, and let people have a good time. The rest is all details.

If you suck at TOing it is okay to still host. Just ask for help or only have one event.

99% of all the TOs I see manipulate the bracket in their favor. If the TO doesn't ask someone else "does this look good" or that person isn't impartial, they are manipulating the bracket in their favor or their friend's favor. They may not even know it.

I could write these for hours because I've done this for a long time. If you're arguing in your head or want to post a minor critique or a line-by-line analysis, that means you aren't interested in learning but more interested in being right. This thought process bleeds over to TOing and creating rulesets, so recognize you are untrustworthy.

Every good TO has a helper or two. Find them and let them help you so you don't have to do everything yourself. You probably have been to a dozen tournaments and don't remember half the stuff I wrote up above.