Running the tournament day
On the day, the job changes from building a tournament to keeping it accurate. Scores need to arrive, standings and brackets need to follow, and someone needs to see the whole site at once.
Getting scores in
Match cards. FairGame generates printable match cards under Tools → Match Cards, grouped by pitch, each carrying a QR code for its match, a short reference code and a box to write the final result on. Print them per pitch — "Download PDF", or your browser's print dialog — and hand the stack to whoever is running that pitch. Scanning the code opens the scoring screen for that match and nothing else — no login, no navigating, no picking the right fixture from a list of four hundred.
This matters more than it sounds. The alternative is a volunteer finding the right match in an app on a cold morning, and the errors that produces.
The referee portal. Referees get their own link showing the matches assigned to them, and can enter results from it. See referees.
Directly in the admin app. Someone at a desk can enter or correct any result, from the Matches page or the control room's pitch status list. Corrections are normal — a score entered wrong on the pitch is fixed here, and the scoring screen says so once a score is locked.
A printed match card stays valid even if fixtures are regenerated afterwards, so a re-solve during the tournament does not send you back to the printer.
What updates automatically
Entering a result updates, immediately:
- the group's standings — played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, goal difference, points;
- who is qualifying from the group;
- the knockout bracket, when the qualification is settled;
- the public site and the mobile app.
Nobody redraws a bracket between rounds. This is the single biggest operational difference from running a tournament on paper.
The control room
Control room is the whole tournament day on one screen: current status, decisions waiting on you, what is happening on each pitch, and fairness signals. It is the page to leave open at the organizer's desk.
Its purpose is to surface the thing that needs a human: a match that should have finished and has no score, a pitch running late, a decision that is blocking the next round. Under that sits the pitch status list — each pitch's current match with a score box beside it — and a read on how the day is treating teams: average and median rest, the tightest turnaround, and who has waited longest.
Tools → Fairness is the deeper version of that last part. Recompute the ratings after a batch of results and it scores the draw out of 100, with the number of fixtures it expects to be lopsided.
The live dashboard
Tools → Live dashboard shows real-time scores across the tournament with automatic refresh. It is the screen for a projector in the clubhouse or a second monitor, not for doing work on.
When the day slips
Days slip. The useful responses, in order of how much they disturb:
- Absorb it. If matches have gaps, a late match can often finish without moving anything else.
- Move individual matches. Reassign a match to a different pitch or timeslot by hand.
- Re-solve the rest of the day. Played matches stay put and the remainder is re-placed around them. Review the proposal before applying it.
Whichever you choose, announce it if the tournament is published. The schedule on a phone screen does not update the person holding it.