GGI: running esports tournaments without an army of coordinators
GGI esports platform · Iraq
The situation
GGI set out to give gamers in Iraq a proper competitive platform. The problem with running tournaments is that almost all of the work is coordination: choosing a format, building brackets, publishing fixtures, creating Discord channels, chasing results, updating standings and promoting the event. Done by hand, that caps how many events can run and how reliable they are.
What I did
As CTO at ESTAZ I was lead developer and solution architect. The design principle was simple: anything a coordinator does more than once should be done by the system.
- Smart tournament engines that cater for everything from small community events to tournaments with 4,000+ competitors: format selection, multi-stage structures, brackets, fixtures and advancement generated by the system
- Two-way synchronisation with Discord: channels, fixtures, results and announcements kept in step between the platform and the community’s Discord server
- Automatic generation of social media plans to promote each tournament
- Registration, teams and clans, referees, results, rankings and notifications in one system, in English and Arabic
- Role-based access for players, team admins, organisers, referees and site administrators, with an admin console and CMS
The result
Concept to a working MVP in about three months, full functionality within six, and more than 5,000 users registered in the first three months. Tournaments run with a fraction of the manual coordination they needed before.
The visualisation on this page shows one selected workflow, a single-elimination bracket with Discord channels and results, and does not represent the complete platform.
Built with
SvelteKit and TypeScript; Supabase (PostgreSQL, row-level security, Edge Functions); Discord bot with a Redis-backed job queue; TrueSkill ratings; English and Arabic with right-to-left layout; Vercel.
As CTO, Edward took GGI, our esports tournament platform for gamers in Iraq, from concept to a working MVP in about three months and full functionality within six. He automated the parts that used to take hours of manual coordination: tournament formats, fixtures, Discord channels and leaderboards. More than 5,000 players registered in the first three months. Edward combines hands-on development with a clear understanding of how operations actually run.
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