Every couple of weeks someone in a bar pool group asks the same question: "what software should I run my Tuesday-night tournament on?" Half the answers are wrong because they assume you're streaming Smash Bros to Twitch. The other half are wrong because they assume you have a tournament director credential and a printer.
This is a non-marketing rundown of the actual options for running a real-world bar pool, darts, or cornhole tournament. We make BTop, so we have a horse in this race — but we'll tell you when one of the others is genuinely the better fit, because pretending otherwise wastes your time.
The contenders
| Tool | Best for | Free tier? | TV display? | Score entry on phone? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pen and paper | 4 people, one table | Free | No | No |
| Challonge | Online esports / quick brackets | Yes (with ads) | No (web bracket only) | Yes (web) |
| Brackelope | Pool league commissioners | Limited | Limited | Yes |
| start.gg (Smash.gg) | Esports majors and FGC events | Yes | Limited | Yes |
| BTop | Bar tournaments, leagues, basements | Yes (forever, no asterisk) | Yes (the whole product) | Yes |
Now the long version, with honest tradeoffs.
Pen and paper
Don't laugh. For a 4-player single-elim with one table, a sheet of paper and a Sharpie is faster than any software. You write the names, draw the bracket, cross out losers, declare a winner. Total setup time: 90 seconds.
It breaks at 8+ players because someone always asks "wait, who's playing whom next?" and the bracket lives on a piece of paper that's stuck to a beer-soaked table 10 feet away. By 16 players you've got two players accidentally seeded into the same slot and a third arguing they shouldn't have been moved to the loser's bracket.
Use it if: 4 players, one table, casual vibes, you don't care about a leaderboard.
Challonge
Challonge has been the default web bracket tool since the late 2000s. It does single elim, double elim, round robin, and a few oddball formats. The free tier shows ads in the bracket page. Paid plans start around $7/month for ad removal and customization.
What Challonge is great at: online tournaments. You set up a bracket, share a link, players report scores, the bracket auto-advances. Used heavily for Smash, Rocket League, FGC, and some chess.
What Challonge is bad at: physical bar tournaments. There's no real TV display mode — the bracket is a web page, designed to be looked at on a phone. There's no concept of table assignment ("Match 12 is on Table 2"). There's no big-screen "now playing" view. Score entry assumes the player has the link, which means you're sharing a Challonge URL with a guy who's two beers in and trying to remember whether he's on the upper or lower bracket.
Use Challonge if: your players are remote, the tournament is online, you don't need a TV.
Brackelope
Brackelope is built for serious pool league commissioners running APA, BCA, or VNEA seasons. It handles handicaps, season-long stats, multi-week leagues, and player ratings. It's not really one-night-tournament software — it's league-management software with a tournament layer bolted on.
What Brackelope is great at: multi-week pool leagues with handicapping. If you're running an APA season for 60 players across 12 weeks and need to track ratings over time, Brackelope is purpose-built for that.
What Brackelope is bad at: casual one-night tournaments. The setup overhead is high. You need to think about handicaps and player ratings before your eight Tuesday regulars want to play a $5-buy-in tournament. The TV experience is minimal.
Use Brackelope if: you're running a sanctioned pool league with handicaps, season-long ratings, and multi-week scheduling.
start.gg (formerly Smash.gg)
start.gg is the gold standard for esports tournaments — Smash, Tekken, Street Fighter, Rocket League. It does enormous brackets (1000+ players), pools, swiss, you name it. It's the de facto standard for fighting game majors.
What start.gg is great at: esports tournaments at any scale. The bracket display is solid, the queueing is built for major events with stations, and players are used to it.
What start.gg is bad at: bar pool nights. The complexity is overkill. The TV display is functional but designed for esports overlays, not for a bar TV ten feet up the wall. The brand is firmly esports — your average bar pool regular has never heard of it.
Use start.gg if: you're running an esports tournament. For physical-game bar nights, the experience feels off.
BTop
We built BTop because nothing else did the obvious thing: display a real, full-screen, broadcast-style bracket on the bar TV that updates live as matches finish. Not a webpage on a phone. Not an esports overlay. A bar TV that looks like the kind of bracket you'd see on a sports broadcast.
The whole product is built around three constraints we kept hearing from operators:
- Players don't have accounts. They're at a bar. They want to play, not download an app.
- The TV is the product. Half the value is creating the "we're at a real tournament" vibe in the bar. The TV view does that work.
- The free tier has to actually be free. Single-table single-elim covers 80% of bar tournaments. We don't paywall that.
What BTop is great at: bar pool, darts, and cornhole tournaments. Setup takes five minutes. The TV view, the QR code, the live bracket animation, the trophy reveal at the end — all built for a bar context.
What BTop is bad at: online tournaments, multi-week leagues with handicaps, esports majors. It's a tournament-night tool. If you need season-long stats with ratings or you're trying to run a Twitch-streamed Smash event, use one of the others.
Use BTop if: you're running a tournament tonight, in person, and you have a TV.
How to actually choose
Skip the comparison tables. Here's the four-question version:
- Are players in the same room? If no — Challonge or start.gg.
- Is it a multi-week league with handicaps? If yes — Brackelope.
- Is it a Smash / fighting-game / esports event? If yes — start.gg.
- Is it pool, darts, cornhole, shuffleboard, or beer pong at a bar or backyard? If yes — try BTop. The free tier covers it. Drop in here.
What we don't try to be
BTop isn't a league management platform. We don't track handicaps over a season. We don't do swiss-style pools. We don't issue ranking points. If your league needs that, Brackelope is the right answer.
BTop also isn't an esports tool. There's no overlay for OBS, no auto-stream-update bot, no Smash-specific features. start.gg is the right answer there.
What we are: the fastest path from "I have eight people who want to play tonight" to "we have a champion, here's the bracket on the TV." That's it. That's the whole product.
Honest pricing comparison
| Tool | Free tier | Paid starts at | Best paid feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Challonge | Yes (with ads) | ~$7/mo | Ad removal, custom theming |
| Brackelope | Limited | ~$15/mo per league | Handicap engine, season stats |
| start.gg | Yes | Free for organizers; tournament fee model | Major-event tooling |
| BTop | Yes — single-table single-elim, no ads, no asterisk | $9.99 per tournament unlock | Multi-table running, double-elim, custom race-to formats |
The single biggest pricing difference: BTop's paid layer is per-tournament, not subscription. If you run one premium tournament a month, that's $9.99. If you run ten, the $79 ten-pack drops it to $7.90 each. There's no monthly bill that keeps charging you when you skip a week. We chose this because it matches how bars actually run tournaments — bursty, not steady.
The bottom line
Use Challonge for online stuff. Use Brackelope for serious pool leagues. Use start.gg for esports. Use BTop for the kind of tournament that's actually happening at your bar tonight, with a TV in the corner and 8 people drinking lager and trash-talking.
If that last one is you — drop in. Free tier covers it.