As an organizer, you know that the step of placing participants in your tournament stages is essential for its smooth running, but can be tricky to achieve. Thankfully, Toornament helps you manage your tournament seeding and placement easily with all the flexibility you could need.
The difference between seeding and placement
Before getting to the heart of the matter, we must clearly differentiate between the seeding and placement notions regarding participants.
Seeding is the action of attributing a seed number to a tournament participant, who is given a preliminary ranking for the purpose of the placement. The participant is then placed into the tournament stage based on his seed, so that the best participants usually do not meet until later in the competition.
The placement is the competition step where the participants are attributed a slot in one of the stages of the tournament. This slot can be attributed depending on the seeding of the participants, or other rules, or completely randomly.
The seeding and placement steps are performed on a single interface on the Toornament dashboard.
The Toornament placement interface
Placement without a seeding
Seeding your tournament participants is not mandatory. It depends on your need to classify and separate the participants before placing them in your tournament stages.
If you have decided not to seed your participant, you can use the random method proposed by Toornament to place them into the tournament stage.
If you opened the tournament registrations, you can also place all the newly validated participants automatically to the first stage, following their registration date.
Open the stage configuration section to activate the automated placement
Placement with a seeding
Predefined methods
If you have decided to seed your participants in a ranking-based stage, Toornament provides four predefined methods to place them afterward: adjacent, effort balanced, seed optimized and bracket optimized.
You can check the description of each method and select the best one for your needs from the stage configuration page.
List of placement methods from the tournament stage configuration page
After you have selected the placement method, you can seed your participants from the placement interface. Once seeds are validated, Toornament will place participants accordingly to the placement method selected.
Manual
If you need to manage your tournament placement in a non-standard way, you can manually place participants into the bracket directly, using the visual preview:
You can select any match and place participants in it
Mixed-methods
You can also decide to only allocate a seed to a fraction of your participants. It is thus possible to place the first X participants according to their seed in a stage, and the remainder may be randomly placed.
First 8 players have seeding locked and others are randomly placed
Placement between two stages
Thanks to the flexibility of Toornament, you can place and seed your participants between each tournament stage. You can thus award new seeds to qualified participants for the next stage, or keep those they obtained according to their result in the previous stage.
To make it easier for you, the Toornament interface lets you filter the participants list to only display those coming out of a previous stage.
You can order and select participants who qualified from a previous stage
Go further with the placement
You can go even further in the way participants are distributed, or how rounds and matches are organized, with advanced guides from our Knowledge Base: https://help.toornament.com/placement/