The 5-step tournament wizard | FishTourney Docs

Creating a tournament takes five steps. The wizard walks you through each one in order, validating each step before you advance. You can navigate back to any earlier step at any time, and your work is saved automatically to a local draft so you can pick up where you left off if you close the tab.

Step 1 — Basics

Enter your tournament name (up to 200 characters) and a description. The description supports rich text — bold, italic, lists, and links — and can be up to 5,000 characters. You can also upload a featured image here. JPEG, PNG, and WebP files are accepted up to 10 MB. Images are displayed in a wide landscape crop, so a 16:9 photo works best; the platform will center-crop narrower images.

Decisions to make before this step: what you want to call the event, whether you have a cover photo ready, and whether you want to write the full rules now or come back after you have confirmed the format.

Tournament wizard step 1 — name, description, and featured image fields — Step 1 — Basics: name, description, and optional cover image.

Step 2 — Location

Choose how you want to describe where the tournament takes place:

Venue — a specific place such as a lake, marina, or dock. Type a location name and select from the autocomplete suggestions; the coordinates are geocoded and a static map is shown on the tournament detail page.
Region — a broad area such as a state, lake system, or coastal zone. You enter a free-text label; no geocoding is performed.
Virtual — no location. Anglers fish from wherever they like. Use this for online-only events or multi-day personal-best challenges.

Only venue-type tournaments display a map on the public tournament page.

Tournament wizard step 2 — location type picker with venue, region, and virtual options — Step 2 — Location: venue (with geocoded map), region, or virtual.

Step 3 — Details

Set the schedule, capacity, pricing, visibility, and registration types.

Start and end date/time— shown in your browser's local timezone. Once a tournament has started, dates cannot be changed.
Max participants — the hard cap on registrations. Must be at least 2. Registration closes automatically when the cap is reached.
Entry fee — optional. Leave blank for a free event. If you plan to collect fees through Stripe Connect, enter the per-angler amount here.
Visibility — Public events appear on the browse page and anyone can join immediately. Private events appear on the browse page but registrations require your approval. Unlisted events are not listed anywhere; only people with the share link can find them.
Registration types — you can allow individual registration, team registration, or both. If you enable teams, set the minimum and maximum team size (1–20 members). Registration type cannot be changed once the tournament is active.

Tournament wizard step 3 — dates, entry fee, visibility, and registration options — Step 3 — Details: schedule, capacity, pricing, and registration format.

Step 4 — Scoring

Configure how catches are verified and scored. This step has two main sections: verification settings and divisions.

Verification & photo settings (expandable panel):

Auto-verify catches — catches count toward the leaderboard immediately on submission without organizer review. Leave this off if you want to manually approve each catch before it goes live.
Allow trophy shots — anglers can upload an optional display photo (holding the fish, scenery) shown in the activity feed, separate from the measurement photo.
Require camera capture — evidence photos must be taken with the device camera; gallery uploads are blocked. Use this for events where photo integrity matters.
AI photo analysis — automatically analyze catch photos for species identification, length estimation (requires a measuring board in the photo), and alive/dead assessment. See AI-assisted verification for details.

Divisions — divide the tournament into categories. Each division has its own species list, measurement method, and leaderboard. Divisions are covered in detail on the Divisions page.

Rules — an optional rich-text field for tournament rules, up to 10,000 characters. This is displayed on the tournament detail page.

Tournament wizard step 4 — verification settings and division builder — Step 4 — Scoring: verification options, divisions, and rules.

Step 5 — Review

A summary of every setting before you publish. Each section — Basics, Location, Schedule & Pricing, Scoring & Rules, Registration — is shown as a compact read-only grid. Click any earlier step in the indicator bar to jump back and make changes.

When you are satisfied, click Create Tournament (or Save Changesif you are editing). The tournament is created immediately and you are redirected to the tournament management page.

Tournament wizard step 5 — read-only summary of all settings before publishing — Step 5 — Review: confirm every setting before creating the tournament.

Step 1 — Basics

Step 2 — Location

Choose how you want to describe where the tournament takes place:

Venue — a specific place such as a lake, marina, or dock. Type a location name and select from the autocomplete suggestions; the coordinates are geocoded and a static map is shown on the tournament detail page.
Region — a broad area such as a state, lake system, or coastal zone. You enter a free-text label; no geocoding is performed.
Virtual — no location. Anglers fish from wherever they like. Use this for online-only events or multi-day personal-best challenges.

Only venue-type tournaments display a map on the public tournament page.

Step 3 — Details

Set the schedule, capacity, pricing, visibility, and registration types.

Start and end date/time— shown in your browser's local timezone. Once a tournament has started, dates cannot be changed.
Max participants — the hard cap on registrations. Must be at least 2. Registration closes automatically when the cap is reached.
Entry fee — optional. Leave blank for a free event. If you plan to collect fees through Stripe Connect, enter the per-angler amount here.
Visibility — Public events appear on the browse page and anyone can join immediately. Private events appear on the browse page but registrations require your approval. Unlisted events are not listed anywhere; only people with the share link can find them.
Registration types — you can allow individual registration, team registration, or both. If you enable teams, set the minimum and maximum team size (1–20 members). Registration type cannot be changed once the tournament is active.

Step 4 — Scoring

Configure how catches are verified and scored. This step has two main sections: verification settings and divisions.

Verification & photo settings (expandable panel):

Auto-verify catches — catches count toward the leaderboard immediately on submission without organizer review. Leave this off if you want to manually approve each catch before it goes live.
Allow trophy shots — anglers can upload an optional display photo (holding the fish, scenery) shown in the activity feed, separate from the measurement photo.
Require camera capture — evidence photos must be taken with the device camera; gallery uploads are blocked. Use this for events where photo integrity matters.
AI photo analysis — automatically analyze catch photos for species identification, length estimation (requires a measuring board in the photo), and alive/dead assessment. See AI-assisted verification for details.

Divisions — divide the tournament into categories. Each division has its own species list, measurement method, and leaderboard. Divisions are covered in detail on the Divisions page.

Rules — an optional rich-text field for tournament rules, up to 10,000 characters. This is displayed on the tournament detail page.

Step 5 — Review

When you are satisfied, click Create Tournament (or Save Changesif you are editing). The tournament is created immediately and you are redirected to the tournament management page.