Features

Three competition modes, and the player-driven platform underneath them.

Championship Bracket Ranked Across every mode

Championship

Flexible competitions that run over days or weeks.

Championship mode is built for communities that want structure without the rigidity of a full round-robin. Players don’t have to face everyone, match volume is capped on purpose, and the season can stretch across days or weeks to fit real availability.

Standings persist across every match, scoring is yours to configure (points per victory, draw, and loss), and a set of fairness limits keeps a long season from being gamed: caps on matches per player, on repeat pairings, and on repeat matchups.

Championship limits

A full set of fairness rules to stop a season-long championship from being gamed.

Championships run for weeks or months, which opens the door to gaming the standings. Skol Arena gives organizers a dedicated set of limits to close that off:

Max matches per player (1–100) — a rolling cap on how many matches count toward a player’s standings. Matches beyond the cap still happen and stay visible, but score zero — the oldest matches count first, so it behaves like a running best-of-N.
Max times with the same partner (1–10) — caps how often the exact same teammates can pair up together.
Max times against the same opponent (1–10) — caps how often the exact same two sides can face each other.
Allow draws — turn draw results on or off for the whole championship.
Score tracking — enable or disable numeric scores entirely, and optionally bound reported scores with a min/max range.
Team size bounds — set the minimum and maximum players per team.
Points per victory / draw / loss — the standings scoring system, fully configurable per championship.

Once a championship leaves draft status these settings lock — they become read-only for the rest of the season, so the rules can’t shift mid-competition. Ranked seasons have their own tuning (see Ranked mode) and brackets don’t need season-long caps at all.

Championship standings with points, matches played, wins, losses and score difference — Standings, once the caps have been applied

Bracket

Elimination tournaments, playoffs, and final stages.

Use Bracket mode when you want the classic elimination experience. Single or double elimination, losers bracket routing, and a bronze match are all handled for you.

It works standalone, but it also works as the closing stage of a longer competition: seed the bracket straight from a finished championship’s standings and the ranking your players earned over the season decides who meets who.

Seeding & bracket generation

Random draw, or seed the bracket from a finished championship's standings.

Brackets are generated in one action, in single or double elimination — the losers bracket routing and the bronze match are handled for you.

Two seeding strategies are available:

Random — a straight draw.
Championship-based — seeds are derived from the standings of a finished championship. The source competition has to be finished and share the same discipline, and participants must actually have played finalized matches in it, so a final stage always reflects the season that earned it.

A single elimination bracket with quarter-finals and semi-finals played — A bracket drawn from a finished season

Ranked

A persistent MMR ladder for continuous competitive play.

Ranked stands on its own. It doesn’t depend on a championship or a bracket. It’s built for ongoing competitive matches where players face each other whenever they want, climb a real MMR ladder, and keep the competition alive between events.

Ratings run on an Elo-derivative tuned per season, rank tiers move with the player pool instead of sitting in fixed bands, and a player’s first ranked match enrolls them automatically. Results must be reported within 48 hours of being played, so the ladder reflects what actually happened.

Flagship

Ranked mode

A real Elo-derivative MMR ladder — dynamic tiers, per-discipline team scoring, instant feedback on every match.

Elo-derivative MMR5 dynamic rank tiersLive provisional leaderboardPer-discipline scoring modes

Ranked isn’t a leaderboard bolted onto a bracket — it’s a full competitive ladder system, season over season.

Real MMR, tuned per season

Every ranked season runs on an Elo-derivative rating: each match’s outcome is compared against what was expected given both sides’ current MMR, and ratings adjust accordingly. Organizers tune two knobs per season — a base MMR (where new players start) and a K-factor (how fast ratings move) — and a placement phase: a player’s first several matches run at double K-factor, so their rating converges to an accurate level fast instead of drifting slowly over dozens of games.

Team scoring that adapts to the discipline

Team-based disciplines don’t all work the same way, so Ranked doesn’t force one formula on everyone. Each discipline picks how a team’s result is distributed to individual MMR:

Individual — teammates are scored on their own merit. A losing player who was personally stronger than the opposing average loses more; a weaker teammate on a losing team is shielded.
Shared Resource — the inverse: on a loss, the individually weaker teammate absorbs more of the penalty (the “weak link” effect), while a strong carry is shielded.
Collaborative — full shared blame. Every losing teammate takes the exact same flat penalty, win or lose together.

Across all three modes, winning always rewards the biggest personal underdog on the winning team the most — upsets pay off.

On top of that, each discipline’s outcome types (see Disciplines & outcomes) can amplify or dampen the official MMR change with a multiplier, or turn MMR off entirely for a given result — a forfeit doesn’t have to touch anyone’s rating.

Tiers that move with the population

Rank tiers aren’t fixed MMR bands — they’re percentile-based, and recalculated automatically as the player pool shifts. The default ladder has five tiers (Rookie, Challenger, Confirmé, Expert, and Légende for the top 5%), fully customizable, and a new season can clone an existing season’s tier structure instead of starting from scratch.

Instant feedback, confirmed result

The moment a match is reported, players see a live MMR estimate on a provisional leaderboard — no waiting. Once the match is finalized, the official change locks in. Along the way, the app celebrates tier-ups and flags standout moments with contextual match labels: Rookie Protection for new players facing much stronger opposition, Exploit for a genuine underdog win, and Favorite Status when the odds were clearly in your favor.

Built for fairness over time

Season soft-reset — carry MMR into a new season pulled halfway back toward the base rating, instead of a jarring hard reset.
48-hour reporting window — ranked results must be reported within 48 hours of being played, keeping the ladder honest.
Auto-enrollment — a player’s very first ranked match creates their ladder entry automatically at the season’s base MMR. No separate sign-up step.
Cascade recalculation — cancelling a finalized match automatically ripples a recalculation through every match and player affected downstream, so the season’s history stays consistent even after the fact.

A ranked leaderboard grouped into Diamond, Platinum, Gold and Silver tiers — Tiers that move with the player pool, not fixed bands

Ranked’s MMR math is driven by each discipline’s scoring rules — see disciplines & scoring, or the full MMR reference in the docs.

Across every mode

The capabilities every competition mode builds on.

Player-driven match workflow

Anyone taking part in a match can create it, report the score, confirm or contest the other side’s report, correct their own entry, and cancel a match that shouldn’t count — with a discussion thread on every match and a kiosk role for shared club terminals.

Configurable match validation

Four validation modes — none, auto after a delay, strict confirmation, or admin-only — plus a trust score that fast-tracks reliable reporters and resets when someone disputes them. A contested match never resolves on a timer.

Match formats beyond 1v1

Every match opposes two sides, A and B, holding the same number of players each. Teams are grouped per match (flex) or carried across the whole event (static), with a minimum and maximum team size you set — so 1v1 chess, 2v2 foosball and 5v5 five-a-side all fit. N-way formats such as 1v1v1 are on the roadmap.

Static team rosters

Add and remove members, keep a stable team identity across every match, and let standings track the team rather than reshuffling per round.

Disciplines & outcomes

Set up a discipline once — name, icon, team scoring mode — then give it outcome types that each carry their own points, MMR multiplier, and a counts-for-MMR switch. A forfeit does not have to move anyone’s rating.

Mobile-first, installable

Tournament pages, match creation and player selection all have dedicated mobile components with their own navigation and stepper — not a desktop layout squeezed down. It installs as a Progressive Web App too, so players open it standalone from their home screen and updates roll out in the background.

Player stats & head-to-head

Every player has a public stats profile: match history, tournament participation, and win rate. Pick any two players and see their head-to-head record side by side.

Game rules pages

Admins write tournament rules with a full WYSIWYG editor and link them to any tournament. Players get a clean, always-current rules page — no more PDFs buried in a Discord channel.

Contextual rules engine

Beta

Configurable messages and badges fire on match and tournament state, delivered live over WebSocket. Badges are season trophies by default, and a profile keeps the tally.

Bilingual by default

The Skol Arena app is fully bilingual, with French and English support built in from the start — players pick their language, and the whole interface follows.

Secure authentication

Native email and password, Keycloak OIDC single sign-on, or both on the same login screen — with a Keycloak account linking automatically to a native one that shares its email.

Organizations

Attaching an organization hides a tournament from the listing and closes it: standings, matches and entries are all refused to non-members, so a shared link leaks nothing. A player can belong to several organizations at once.

Invitation codes

Every account starts from a four-word code with its own use count, expiry, and optional organization binding. The gate applies to every login method — Keycloak SSO does not bypass it.