OpenGotha is an open source tournament management program. It has many features designed to be used in the real world for in person tournaments. It is much more flexible than the automated tournaments found on Online-Go.com. If you want to be able to add and remove players in an ongoing tournament, modify pairing or handicaps for games, manually match certain players while intelligently automatically matching other players based on their AGA or EGF ranks and current tournament performance, adjust the number of rounds while a tournament is ongoing, and all of that sort of stuff - using OpenGotha is what you want to do.

Online-Go.com has a special tournament mode to be able to import and export OpenGotha tournament files. This allows a tournament director to manage the tournament using OpenGotha, but have the games played on Online-Go.com. The general work flow is to deal with pairing, and round management in OpenGotha, upload the tournament file, let the players play their games, download the results, and then move on to managing the next round. Once you are done, you can upload the results as presented by OpenGotha for everyone to see.

This guide will walk you through how to create an OpenGotha tournament on Online-Go.com and how to manage it through the life cycle of the tournament.

Creating an OpenGotha Tournament

To create a tournament navigate to the group the tournament will be run under, and click "Create tournament"

Enter the tournament details, making sure you select "OpenGotha" for the tournament type

Player registration

After a tournament is created, players can either join the tournament using the 'Join this tournament!' button (if the Exclusivity of the tournament was set to Open), or the tournament director can manually add the players using OpenGotha. To synchronize players you've added manually in OpenGotha, add the player, save the tournament file, and then upload the tournament xml file to Online-Go.com using the "Upload to Online-Go.com" area found on the tournament page.

Uploading files to Online-Go.com should always be safe, and will not cause anyone to be unregistered from a tournament, the new additions will simply be added. Note however that if you are uploading a tournament file that has someone who has dropped out, they will be re-added, so it is best to work with a recent copy of the tournament obtained by clicking "Download to OpenGotha".

After uploading a tournament file you will be presented with a log of changes that transpired, for example uploading a file that specified a number of players to add to the tournament might look something like this:

Closing registration and starting the tournament

Once you've added all the players to the tournament you can click 'Close registration' on the tournament page. You can still add players via OpenGotha manually, however no one will be able to click 'Join this tournament!' to add themselves to the tournament.

Running the tournament

Pairing players

When it's time to prepare games for the next round, the first thing you should do is download the latest tournament file by clicking "Download to OpenGotha"

Once downloaded, open the tournament in OpenGotha and click "Games" from the menu, followed by "Pair", and pair your players:

Once paired, save your tournament file, and upload it to Online-Go.com using the "Upload to Online-Go.com" found on the tournament page. You should see the pairings appear for that round.

You can do this at any point, and if you want to modify the pairings simply modify the pairings in OpenGotha, save the changes, and upload the new .xml file, this will replace the pairings.

Once satisfied with the pairings and you are ready to start the games, click 'Start round'. This will create the games between the players and they should go play their games. As games conclude, the results will appear under the round details.

Once all games have concluded, it's time to download the tournament file again, this will have the results for all of the games played, and OpenGotha will use those results for the next rounds pairing.

Uploading standings

OpenGotha can produce a .html file of the current standings of players by clicking "Publish" and selecting the "Publish standings after round N" button

You can then upload the generated .html file to the tournament using the same "Upload to Online-Go.com" area, this will make a "Standings" button available for viewers to see the current tournament standings