Champions Deck: Esports Tournament Management System
// key_features
- Role-based access for Admin
- Tournament Manager
- Game Manager
- and Viewer
- Full tournament lifecycle: propose
- approve
- schedule
- score
- Team registration and match scheduling
- Secure authentication with email verification and OTP-based password reset
- Admin dashboard with user management and audit logs
- Normalized SQL Server schema across 11+ related tables
// description
Champions Deck is a desktop application built to handle the end-to-end operations of running esports tournaments, from proposal and approval through match scheduling and live score updates. It's built around four distinct roles — Admin, Tournament Manager, Game Manager, and Viewer — each with its own tailored dashboard and permissions. The purpose was to solve the coordination problem esports organizers actually face: tournament proposals need review before going live, teams need to register and get scheduled, scores need updating in real time, and all of this needs proper access control so the wrong person can't approve their own tournament or edit games they don't manage. The target users are esports organizations running tournaments — admins who oversee the whole system, tournament managers who run events day-to-day, game managers who maintain the game roster, and viewers (players and fans) who just want to browse and follow tournaments.
// challenges
Building a role-based system with four distinct user types (Admin, Tournament Manager, Game Manager, Viewer) in Windows Forms meant carefully managing which forms and controls were even accessible per role, since desktop UI doesn't have the same straightforward route-guarding you get on the web. Implementing secure authentication — including email verification and OTP-based password resets — inside a desktop app also required integrating SMTP email sending directly into the C# codebase, which took some trial and error to get reliable.
// future_plans
Migrating from a Windows Forms desktop app to a web-based platform so tournament organizers and viewers could access it from any device without installing anything. Adding real-time match score updates via a live feed, and building out a public-facing viewer portal with richer tournament statistics and bracket visualizations.