Managing Participants & Seeding

Player Management Before the Bracket Starts

Proper participant management and seeding are critical to running a fair tournament. Spaghetti Showdown gives organizers full control over who enters the bracket and where they are placed.

Adding Participants

Players can register for your tournament in several ways:

• Self-registration - Players sign up directly from the tournament page using their Spaghetti Showdown account (linked via Discord).
• Manual entry - As a tournament organizer, you can add players manually from the participants panel. This is useful for walk-up registrations at in-person events.
• Import - Bulk-add participants by importing from a spreadsheet or from an external platform like Start.gg.

Removing Participants

If a player needs to be removed before the bracket starts, select them from the participants list and click Remove. Removing a player after registration closes but before the bracket is generated will automatically adjust seeding positions. If the bracket has already started, use the DQ or forfeit options instead (see Running a Live Tournament).

Approval Mode

When approval mode is enabled during tournament creation, every registration goes into a pending queue. You can review each applicant and approve or reject them individually. This is useful for invitational events, skill-gated tournaments, or community events where you want to vet participants before confirming entry.

Check-In

The check-in feature helps reduce no-shows. When enabled, a check-in window opens before the tournament starts (the duration is configured in tournament settings). Players must confirm their attendance during this window or they are automatically removed from the bracket. Players who have not checked in are highlighted in the participants list so you can easily see who is missing.

Seeding

Seeding determines where players are placed in the bracket, ensuring that the strongest players do not face each other in early rounds. Spaghetti Showdown offers two approaches:

• Automatic seeding - The platform uses the players' ELO ratings and past performance within your community to generate a seed order. This is the recommended approach for most events.
• Manual seeding - Drag and drop players in the participants list to reorder seeds. Place the strongest players at seed 1, 2, etc. Manual seeding is useful when you have external knowledge about player skill (for example, a PGR-ranked player attending your local for the first time).

Seeding Best Practices

For Double Elimination brackets, proper seeding ensures that the expected top players meet deep in the bracket rather than in round one. A good rule of thumb is to seed based on recent results in your community. If this is a first-time event, consider using the automatic ELO-based seeding and adjusting manually only for known outliers. Avoid random seeding for competitive events, as it produces lopsided brackets and can lead to a poor experience for both top players and newer entrants.