How to run a tournament

There are two routes in, and they drive the same engine: the same draws, the same shareable player page, the same PDFs. Sign in and chat with the agent built into turnale.app, or connect Turnale to the assistant you already use. Start on one and you can still move to the other — a tournament created here hands over to your own assistant whenever you want it to.

Organise here, on turnale.app

Nothing to install and no assistant of your own required. You describe the tournament in the chat and the player page builds itself beside it as you talk.

1. Sign in at turnale.app/organise with Google or a six-digit code sent to your e-mail.
2. Hit New tournament and say what you are organising. The agent asks only what it needs — sport, who is playing or just a headcount, how long you have — and lays out the formats that fit with the schedule math already done.
3. Share the page link with your players. The chat stays open for scores, dropouts and swaps, and the page follows along live.

My tournaments holds everything you have run: the page link, the conversation to pick up where you left off, and a delete behind a two-step confirmation. Three tournaments a calendar month are free, and the count resets on the 1st.

We run the model on this route, so the conversation is stored with your account and deleted 90 days after its last message — the tournament, its results and its audit log are untouched by that and stay on the page. The privacy policy names the processor.

Every tournament created here still has an organiser key, held for you rather than handed over. Reveal it from the ⋯ menu in My tournaments and the same tournament opens up to your own assistant, using the route below.

Start a tournament →

Or connect the assistant you already use

Turnale is also an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT and the rest can run tournaments directly from the chat you are already in. One connector URL works everywhere, this route needs no Turnale account and no API key, and nothing caps how many tournaments you run. Connect once and it is there for every evening after.

Not sure how? Share that URL with your assistant and ask: “How can I connect turnale.app here?” It will figure out the rest.

Per-platform steps

The organiser key

Creating a tournament returns two things: a shareable page link for players and an organiser key (tk_…). On this route the key is the only credential — nothing to register, nothing to remember but the key itself. It cannot be recovered, so keep the message your assistant sent. Anyone with the key can manage the tournament through chat; the page link on its own is safe to share.

Would rather not hold a key? That is the route above — sign in and the key stays in custody with your account instead of in a message you have to keep.

Say this to start

Either route understands the same opening.

• “We’re 18 tonight, 4 courts from 7 to 9, levels pretty mixed. What would you run?”
• “Here’s my player list from Excel, levels in the second column.”
• “Jonas can’t come after all — round 3 starts now, sort out the rest.”

Handing over your players

Paste the names in any shape and the agent will sort them out — a group-chat dump, numbered, comma-separated. Only a headcount so far? Say so, and players add themselves through the page link instead. Alongside each name you can write whatever you would tell a co-organiser: a level on any scale you already use (higher means stronger, and only the order and the gaps within this one tournament matter), a gender, which an americano uses to keep both teams in a match the same make-up where the field allows it, and tells you how many matches could be even when the numbers don’t allow it, and comments in your own words — arrival times, pairing wishes, who is new — which the agent takes into account when it builds the draw and the schedule.

Rate only the players you’re sure about. An unrated player sits in the middle of the field, so a half-filled column is worth more than an empty one and never counts against the people you skipped. Levels only mean something inside one tournament: a 4 here is not a 4 anywhere else, and the draw reads nothing but the order and the gaps.

If a spreadsheet suits you better, fill in the player list template (.xlsx, one player per row, name the only required column) and hand the file to your own assistant — it reads the file and passes the rows on; ask it for the template and it can send you one itself. The chat here on turnale.app takes typed text rather than attachments, so copy the names out of the sheet and paste them in.

What the agent can do

Both routes share one tool set: create a tournament (americano, mexicano, round robin, groups + playoff, or knockout, for tennis, padel, pickleball, badminton, squash and table tennis — each one explained in plain language here) · suggest and explain formats with the schedule math done for you · manage the roster or open self-signup with a cap and waitlist · generate a fair draw and schedule · record scores, walkovers and retirements · handle dropouts and substitutions mid-event · undo any mistake · print the tournament PDF · end the evening early with honest final standings.

One difference: deleting a tournament. Your own assistant does it with a key you hold, on your word. The built-in agent cannot — deletion lives in My tournaments as a two-step confirmation, where nothing a player types into a signup box can reach it.

See it first

The guided demo replays a real organiser’s evening next to the live tournament page it produces. For agents and crawlers, a machine-readable overview lives at /llms.txt.