Tournament setup

This guide takes you from an empty tournament to the first live heat. Prerequisite: the Tournament app module is enabled for your organization.

1. Create the tournament

1. Tournament → Tournaments → New tournament: title, date, location.
2. MOEP automatically creates a linked event on your website — that’s where spectators register and find all the info.
3. In the format assistant pick a preset: qualifying → final · qualifying → hope round → final · standard · without hope round.
4. The assistant shows you the whole bracket up front — one box per heat with the number of start slots in it. What you see there is what gets created.

2. Format & settings

The tournament’s settings drawer controls the competition mode:

Setting	Effect
Runs per heat	How many runs each rider gets per heat (typically 3).
Advancers per heat	Top N (1–3) advance to the next round.
Knockout merge	Sets the target size of the knockout heats (merge × advancers, typically 2 × 2 = 4). If fewer riders advance, the heats get smaller instead of half empty.
Seeding	Random or snake (serpentine by bib number).
Drop scores / best runs	Whether the worst scores are dropped.
Deviation threshold	From which judge difference the head judge sees a hint.
Run duration	Drives the live timer for judges and spectators.
Self-registration	Lets riders register via the public tournament page — while the tournament is still in preparation. Registration closes automatically once the contest starts.

Heat mode: standard or wavepool

In the scoring tab you choose the heat mode:

• Standard (timed heat): several riders surf in parallel over a time window (the previous behaviour).
• Wavepool: fixed, numbered waves instead of timed runs. The pool produces several sides at once (default Left Wave / Right Wave); a judge picks one side and only scores its waves. Several riders are in the pool at once and the waves come alternating.

Wavepool mode reveals extra settings:

Setting	Effect
Pool sides	Named list (1–6). Default Left Wave / Right Wave; freely renameable.
Wave count	Fixed per surfer or from heat duration.
Waves per surfer	How many waves each rider gets per side.
Result formula	Average of best per side (default, e.g. (6+8)/2 = 7), sum of best per side, or best N overall.
Best waves per side	How many top waves per side count toward the result (default 1).

Per-wave scoring uses the same criteria system as standard mode (1–N weighted criteria).

How the bracket is built

You set the number of start slots; everything else follows from it. Three rules explain why your bracket looks the way it does:

1. Heats are filled evenly. Six riders across two heats means 3 + 3, not 4 + 2 — and if only six advance, the next round gets two heats of three rather than two heats of four with empty seats.
2. The chain ends by itself. As soon as everyone left fits into one heat, that heat is the final. There is no round that exists only because the arithmetic produced it.
3. Winner and runner-up are pulled apart. Whoever wins a heat and whoever comes second in it do not meet again in the next round; they meet the advancers from the other heats. Only the final brings everyone together — there is nothing to separate.

MOEP works out the hope round itself. Its heat size and how many advance from it follow from the number of eliminated riders: they are split into equal heats of four, otherwise of three; a heat of four sends two on, a heat of three sends one. You only decide whether there is one.

Two examples with heat size 4 and top 2:

Riders	Bracket
12, with hope round	Qualifying 3 × 4 → hope round 2 × 3 → semifinal 2 × 4 → final
24, with hope round	Qualifying 6 × 4 → hope round 4 × 3 → round 2 4 × 4 → semifinal 2 × 4 → final

3. Categories & riders

1. Create categories (e.g. Open Men, Open Women) — each category gets its own bracket.
2. Add riders (Tournament → Athletes or directly in the tournament): name, category, bib number — optionally photo, hometown and bio for the public rider profile.
3. Alternatively riders register themselves via the public tournament page (if enabled) — you confirm the registrations in the roster. As soon as you start the tournament the register button disappears and the server rejects further self-registrations; as an admin you can still add or invite riders.

4. Assign judges

1. Grant the module roles Judge / Head Judge under User management → Members — those people then appear as suggestions.
2. In the tournament, use Assign judges: pick a member via search or invite an external person by email; set their role in the tournament (judge or head judge).
3. Every assigned person automatically receives an email with a direct link to the judging interface. Typical setups use 3–5 judges plus one head judge.

→ How judges and the head judge work with it: Judging guide

5. Heats & schedule

1. Generate heats — from the confirmed riders per category, according to seeding. Assign lycra colors per heat in the heat detail view.

   Only the first round can be generated up front

   A final or repechage round takes its field from the heats before it — who is in it only follows from their results. As long as the previous round has not been surfed and completed, there is nobody to seed, and MOEP now tells you so (“Nobody has qualified for this round yet”). For the same reason “Propose redistribution” only works once the round already has heats.

2. Schedule: heat durations (by heat size), buffer, contest start per day and time zone — start times are computed automatically and shown on the public tournament page. The running order can be sorted freely.
3. Plan breaks: in the running order, ”+ Break” adds a break after any heat — free label (e.g. “lunch break”) and a duration in minutes. A break is anchored to its position in the running order, not to a wall-clock time: reorder the heats and the break moves along. Every following heat shifts by the break duration — shown as its own row in the schedule and counted into the bracket times.

   When the contest runs into a break

   A running heat is never cut short. If a heat before the break is still open when the break was due to start, the tournament hub warns (“heat running into the break”) and the break shrinks accordingly.

6. Going live

1. Set the tournament to active — this also publishes the event.
2. Activate the first heat → the runs are created and judges see the heat in their app.
3. From now on the head judge drives the flow (start run → score → confirm).
4. After the last heat of a round the top N advance automatically; hope round and final fill according to the format.
5. At the end: set the tournament to completed — the results stay public.

Pausing during the live contest

The head judge and contest director can pause a heat or the whole contest — the run clock freezes. On resume, the schedule shifts from the first uncompleted heat by the pause duration; heats already surfed keep their times. That is the reaction to a delay — the planned breaks from step 5 are the planning.

Spectators & streaming

• Public tournament page: leaderboard, bracket, schedule, live heat — all in real time at yourclub.moep.cloud/tournament/….
• Configure OBS overlays (leaderboard, lower third, results, rider profile) in the tournament hub and add them as browser sources to your streaming setup.

Changing things afterwards

Heat size: The setting applies from the next generation. An existing field does not redistribute itself — use Propose redistribution in the round dialog. You first see how the round would look, and only then apply it. Heat schedule details are preserved.

Division size: Can be adjusted after setup. Growing adds start slots, shrinking removes them. Registered riders are never deleted — if you try to go below their number, MOEP reports the limit instead of removing participants.

Deleting a round: The rounds below it live off this one — their seats are references like “winner of semifinal 1”. MOEP therefore deletes the round together with everything below it and rebuilds the chain from the remaining field, by the same rules as during setup. Delete the hope round with 12 riders and 6 advancers are left, so the semifinal shrinks accordingly (2 × 3 instead of 2 × 4).

Both are blocked once the round or division has been scored: a redistribution would separate heat results from the riders who earned them. For the same reason a round can no longer be deleted once a round below it is running or scored — it would have to be rebuilt.