Managing arenas

Arenas are places players are assigned to play. In the case of pinball tournaments, an arena typically represents a pinball machine. After creating a tournament, you can add arenas to the tournament from the Arenas tab. If you do not see an Arenas tab, your tournament does not need arenas.

Adding arenas

After switching to the Arenas tab, click the Add arena button to add one or more arenas. There are four possible ways to add an arena to your tournament.

Existing arenas

This is simply a list of all arenas you have used in previous tournaments.

Scorbit

Use Scorbit to add arenas to your tournament. Your tournament location must be linked to Scorbit to use this feature. If your location is not linked to Scorbit, edit the tournament details to add a new location using the Search tab instead of typing in a location name manually.

Pinball Map

Use Pinball Map to add arenas to your tournament. Your tournament location must be linked to Pinball Map to use this feature. If it's not, go to your locations page and click the Edit or Update button to link it to Pinball Map.

Enter name

Use this to search for an arena by name. Start typing part of the name of a pinball machine and the Open Pinball Database will be searched for any matching machines. If you want to add an arena that's not a pinball machine, you can enter the full name and create a new arena.

Adding arena banks

An arena bank is a collection of arenas that are assigned as a single unit. Before the tournament starts, the organizer must configure each bank of arenas they want to use. Organizers create and edit arena banks from the Banks tab.

The main advantage of using arena banks is that each bank can be assigned more than once. This ensures all player groups are provided a full set of arena assignments if the tournament uses multiple games per round, even there are not enough arenas available to cover every game.

Each arena in a bank is always assigned in the order it appears in the bank. A thorough attempt is made to assign players to a random bank that they have not played before.

You can modify arena banks even after your tournament has started, either by deactivating a bank you no longer want to use or by replacing one or more arenas in the bank in case of malfunctions. You can even create brand new arena banks after the tournament has started.

Arenas page

The Arenas page lists all arenas you have ever used in a tournament. On that page, you can retire arenas so they will not show up on the Existing arenas list when you add arenas to tournaments.

You can also edit your arenas. You can fix spelling mistakes in the arena name, change their category or attach OPDB IDs to arenas that do not have them.