Tournament Rules

01 Format at a glance

A tournament is a bracket of full 4-player Pusoy Dos tables. Players compete in rounds; the top finishers from each round advance and are re-seated into fewer tables, until four players meet at a single final table and a champion is crowned.

Tournament sizes are 8, 16, or 32 players — the only valid sizes. Each is a power-of-two number of 4-player tables that halves cleanly down to one final table:

By default the field halves each round until four players remain. An organizer may instead define a custom bracket that sets how many players advance from each round.

02 Joining a tournament

Every tournament is either open or private, and every tournament has a short unique join code.

Open — appears in the public tournament browser. Join from the list, or with the join code.
Private — hidden from the browser. Joinable only by its join code.

Open vs private is independent of whether the tournament uses the default or a custom bracket — any combination is allowed. (Private tournaments always ship with a defined bracket.)

Auto-start

A tournament fills first-come. The moment the last seat is taken — when entrants equal the tournament's capacity — it starts automatically. There is no manual force-start.

Withdrawing

You may withdraw while a tournament is still filling (before it starts). Once it has started, entries are locked.

03 Games per round

When a tournament is created, the organizer chooses how many games are played per round: 1 to 10 (default 1).

Within a round, every table plays that same number of games, and each player's points accumulate across all of them. More games per round means results depend less on the luck of a single deal and more on consistent play.

A round completes only once every table has finished all of its games. At that point standings lock and advancement is calculated.

04 Scoring

Points are awarded per game, by finishing position. The one special case is winning on the 2 of diamonds (2♦) — the single highest card in Pusoy Dos.

The 2♦ bonus is first-place only. A normal 1st is worth 3 points; finishing 1st with the 2 of diamonds as your last card is worth 4. There is no bonus for playing the 2♦ at any other position.

Your score for a round is the sum of your points across every game in that round. Points are always calculated from your finishes — derived live, never stored as a running total.

05 Advancement

When a round completes, players from all of that round's tables are ranked together into a single standings list, highest points first (ties broken as below).

The top N players advance — N is the round's advance count (half the field by default, or whatever a custom bracket specifies). Everyone below the cutoff is eliminated.

Advancers are re-seated into the next round in rank order: the #1-ranked player takes the first seat, #2 the next, and so on, spread across the next round's tables. This carries seeding strength forward round to round. The last round is the final table of four; its winner is the tournament champion.

06 Tiebreakers

When two or more players finish a round with the same total points, they are separated by the following cascade, applied in order until the tie breaks:

A player who has none of a given result automatically loses that step to a player who has one.

Playoff

If players remain completely identical across all eight tiebreakers and that tie sits right on the advancement cutoff — so it actually decides who moves on — the tournament resolves it with a one-game playoff between the tied players for the contested spot(s). No further computed tiebreaker is invented; it's settled on the table.

The same applies at the final table: if the top players are still tied for 1st after all eight tiebreakers, a one-game playoff decides the champion.

07 Completion

A tournament ends when the final round finishes and no tie remains for first. The winner of the final table is crowned champion, and the tournament is marked complete.

A tournament can hold one of four statuses: Setup (created and filling), Active (full and in progress), Complete (a champion has been crowned), or Cancelled (dissolved before completion — an organizer may cancel a tournament that is still in setup).