Tab with spacing, cool

I also think that tournament-only notification vs pm is better (or at least equal) in terms of getting people's attentions to tournaments they are part of.
Im still not sure what is being counted down TO (and i dont mean "the tournament") because tournaments dont have expiration dates when they are pending. they cannot start with less than the required amount of people, and ending them early isnt fair, but admin can do it manually if its really annoying. Once a tournament has started, you cant join it. I will be integrating the prices+jackpot addon with this as well, but otherwise by itself tournaments wont give anything for winning but stats.
If you wanted open-ended "tournaments" that happen on a weekly basis or whatever, vbarcade already contains the archived scores feature and a scheduled task you can enable to shift scores to archived on set time periods. So that keeps the leaderboard fresh.
Single-elimination tournament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anything else becomes nightmarish to manage and highly vulnerable to no-shows. this way the damage can be localized and removed asap.
Round robin style would definitely take too long in practice, though i know it would be neat in a perfect world.
First-won-first-paired does NOT mean that tournaments are open ended nor have more than 2 people per match. I'm saying that a match is active as soon as two people have qualified into that round, and are matched according to the time they qualified, not their initial position. Lets look at these hypothetical users A-H
Round 1
----------
A v B(1)
C v D(4)
E(2) v F
G v H(3)
the users with (#) won their match against the other guy, and that number is the chronological time that they won their match (so 1 was done at 9am, 2 was done at 10am, 3 at 2pm, 4 at 8pm)
Normally, because of position, you would expect this..
Round 2
---------
B v D
E v H
However, that requires that every person in round 1 is finished. and that wastes time if someone never shows up for their match.
My first-won-first-paired method works such that instead, round 2 looks like
Round 2
---------
B v E
H v D
Which is based on the time that they finished. In fact BvE can start playing Round 2 even before GvH and CvD are finished Round 1. The point is that if someone is going to not show up, it only holds up the
match, and not the whole
round
While on the topic, for tournaments to begin, it must have the full roster of people confirmed for the number of rounds set for the tournament. if theres enough people but not all confirmed, admin can jump-start the whole thing, and if people dont show up, they get disqualified. Theres a configurable time limit (id say default of 12 hours) for you to get your attempts in, or whatever you had gets locked (or you can end early if you are happy with an result). if you didnt show up, you dont advance. if both people in a match dont show up, then the first person to enter that match moves on, where theyll probably time out there too. Cant have lopsided tournaments

Admin can replace people while the tournament is still pending (theres no auto-delete for pending tournaments) but after it is started, the tournament is guaranteed to be over in timelimit * rounds. Fast and active players can do all their games at once as much as they qualify for against each other, and then can leave to get on with their life while the rest catch up, which encourages being fast and active.

its really not as complicated once you get used to it, and it should cut down on delays in tournaments. please keep the ideas flowing!
Here are some admin screenshots of what I've got so far that should hopefully illustrate what I am doing.

(unlimited rounds are actually supported, but that might get out of hand, so its easily extendable if demand happens)

(once enough users are there, you cant invite anymore without removing some. also, you can jump-start the tournament right away at this point even if not everyone has confirmed)

(1 and 6 paired up first because they confirmed first. Test4 has also moved onto Round 2 and will play the next person who also does so, even while 4 other people are in Round 1. Statuses are very helpful)