How we rate a tournament

All three are computed from the organizer’s own published record, which is why the grade exists on the day a listing is filed. Nothing a reviewer wrote enters any of them. The proportions are inherited from the four-component score these replaced: it valued price and terms above exposure claims, and rescaling the three survivors onto 100 keeps that judgement rather than re-arguing it.

These are the weights for the youth index, which is the great majority of the directory. Adult listings are graded on the first two only, rescaled to the same 100 — the adult profile is set out below.

There are 4 gradeable facts: the entry fee, the refund policy, the hotel requirement and the guaranteed game count. Most organizers outside ice hockey publish only some of them — fees in particular usually live behind a registration portal — so every listing also states how many it published, and the grade panel names it in words.

• Fully publishedThis organizer publishes all four terms facts, so the grade rests entirely on stated figures.
• Partly publishedSome of the four terms facts are unpublished and score at the midpoint of their range. The grade is real but it is partly a statement about what has not been said.
• Thinly publishedAlmost nothing is published, so the grade sits near the midpoint of every range by default. Read it as "unknown", not as "average".

Anything unpublished is priced at the middle of its range rather than at zero, so a listing that discloses nothing at all lands on 46 of 100. That figure is not chosen; it falls out of the midpoints, and the letter bands are then pinned to it so that it is the bottom of a C rather than the top of a D. The rule this encodes is worth stating plainly: a D has to be earned by publishing something poor, never by publishing nothing. Quoting on application is normal practice in every sport in the index but hockey, and a scale that dropped every one of those operators to the bottom would be reporting our own missing data as their failing.

The directory is filed in two indexes, youth and adult, and they are not the same market: a youth entry is bought by a parent choosing where a season goes, an adult entry by a player entering themselves or a captain collecting a share from fifteen adults. They are graded on the same 4 facts and the same point tables, but on two profiles — which differ in exactly two ways, both stated here.

One: adult has no exposure component

Exposure asks who is watching and whether the weekend advances a player: college scouts in the stands, a showcase format, a place at a national final, streaming and game video. Those are youth-market questions. An adult recreational weekend has no scouts to publish and no bracket to advance to, so on a 22-point component every adult listing in the directory would sit on the same neutral 11 — a component that separates nothing while taking a fifth of the figure and a panel on every page. Adult is graded on cost and terms, the two things a roster is actually buying, and the total is scaled by ×1.28 so both indexes still publish a figure out of 100. Adult listings print no exposure meter and no exposure panel rather than printing a zero.

Two: adult is graded on a gentler curve

Adult operators publish less. Most quote on application, a great many carry a customary weekend rather than dates, and adult fees are so rarely published that a division median can rest on the 4 listings that are the minimum we will compute one from. Judging that record on the youth curve would report our own thin data as the organizer’s failing. So the cost band is wider — full marks at 70% of the median or cheaper against youth’s 60%, and nothing only at 200% or dearer against youth’s 160% — and every letter asks for 6 fewer points. That relief is derived rather than chosen: it is one step of refund terms, the gap between cash refunds and tiered refunds, carried through the adult scale — about the size of the single term this market most often leaves off its page. The dear end of the band moves further than the cheap end on purpose, because full marks for price should still take a real discount in either index.

Adult letter bands

• A+Outstanding on paper78–100youth 84+
• AStrong on paper67–77youth 73+
• BSound on paper55–66youth 61+
• CMixed on paper45–54youth 46+
• DWeak on paperBelow 45youth 0+

What the two profiles do not differ on is everything that makes the grade checkable: the 4 gradeable facts, the point tables behind the terms ledger, the rule that every unknown scores at the middle of its range rather than at zero, and the rule that a D has to be earned by publishing something poor. An adult listing whose organizer publishes nothing lands on 45 of 100 — pinned, exactly as youth’s 46 is, to the bottom of a C. What an adult listing can reach that a youth one cannot is a true zero, and only one way: by publishing a fee at or above 200% of the median and no refunds and a compulsory hotel block. Silence cannot get there.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the argument for filing two indexes rather than one filter: a letter is a comparison inside an index. A B in the adult index says this weekend is well priced and fairly termed against other adult weekends. Put a youth listing beside it in the comparison table and both figures are still true, but they are answers to two different questions, and the table says so above the columns rather than blending them.

Coaches, managers, parents, players, officials and scouts who attended. Never the organizer. Scouts are on that list because they are the one audience that attends without a team and judges a different thing — whether the event delivered the players it promised to put in front of them — and several listings sell exactly that.

Organizers may answer a review in public, and their responses are labelled and shown. They are excluded from every average, count and return rate here, so an operator cannot move their own rating. There is no form on this site that can file a review as an organizer: the role is not in the list the review form is built from, and the server validates against the same list, so the exclusion is a property of the code rather than a promise about how we behave.

A single five-star review is weak evidence. Rather than let it top the chart, every event’s own average is pulled toward the directory-wide mean in proportion to how few reviews it has. The prior carries the weight of 4 reviews, so an event with four reviews sits halfway between its own average and the directory mean, and an event with forty sits almost entirely on its own record. Both figures are printed on the listing, so you can see what the shrink did.

Below 3 reviews the rating is flagged provisional wherever it appears. With no reviews at all there is no rating and we print not yet rated rather than the directory mean — returning an average for an event nobody has been to would be inventing a review out of arithmetic. That state says something about our review coverage and nothing about the event, which is exactly why the GameVoyaGrade is published beside it either way.

The four sub-ratings are collapsed with organization weighted highest (34%), then the overall verdict (26%), officiating (22%) and venue (18%). Organization leads because it is the one dimension a team cannot inspect before it pays: you can look up a rink, you cannot look up whether the schedule will run late all weekend. The reviewers’ value rating is shown but deliberately left out of that collapse, because price is already the largest component of the grade and counting it twice would double its weight in the pair.

Two scales, because there are two ratings. Every letter label ends in on paper, and that is not hedging: the grade reads the published record, and whether the weekend is any good is the other rating’s business.

GameVoyaGrade

• A+Outstanding on paper84–100Cheap against the sport median, terms that leave the risk with the organizer, and a verified operator. There is nothing on the record here to be careful about.
• AStrong on paper73–83Good value and terms that favour the team, with at most one soft spot in the published detail.
• BSound on paper61–72Sound. Either fair value on ordinary terms or good terms at an ordinary price.
• CMixed on paper46–60Middling, or thinly published. Check how many of the four terms facts this organizer actually put on the record before reading anything into the figure.
• DWeak on paperBelow 46The published terms work against the team: dear per game, refunds that keep your money, a mandatory hotel block, or some combination. This is what the organizer states, not what teams reported.

The adult bands sit 6 points lower and the labels are the same; they are tabled under the adult profile.

Attendee Rating

• Acclaimed4.3 and aboveTeams that went would go again, and say so about the organisation rather than the trophies.
• Positive3.7–4.3Reliably good. Reviewers would return, with one or two caveats worth reading.
• Mixed3–3.7Real trade-offs in what attendees reported. Read the reviews rather than the average.
• Proceed with careBelow 3Recurring complaints about how the weekend was run. Read the reviews before committing a roster.
• Not yet ratedNo reviewsNobody who attended has filed a moderated review yet, so there is nothing to report. This is a statement about our review coverage, not about the event — the GameVoyaGrade beside it is published either way.

We classify published refund wording into four categories and award points against the risk each one leaves with the team. An organizer who publishes nothing scores the same as one who publishes “no refunds”, because a team writing a cheque cannot tell the difference.

The remaining terms points go to not requiring a hotel block (+9), guaranteeing five or more games (+7.5, or +4.5 for four), and verified organizers (+7.5), capped at 37. Verification is the one award here the organizer cannot publish their way into — it is ours to give, which is why it is not counted among the 4 gradeable facts.

Where an organizer has not published a term at all, that term scores at the middle of its range — +6.5 for refunds, +4.5 for the hotel policy, +3.5 for the game guarantee — and the listing says the term is unpublished rather than guessing. Many organizers keep fees and cancellation terms behind a registration portal, so silence is common and we would rather show it than fill it in. An entry fee of zero is read the same way: as a fee we do not have, not as a free event, which is why such a listing carries no cost per game and no place in its sport’s median.

A handful of events — mostly adult and drop-in formats — sell a place to one player rather than an entry to a team. Every listing states which it is. A per-player price is published as we found it, but it is kept out of the cost-per-game figure, out of the sport median and out of the cheapest-entry ranking, and its value component falls to the middle of the range like any other unmeasured figure. One skater at $109 is not fifteen times the value of a team at $1,875, and admitting the two to the same column would move the median that every team in the sport is measured against.

Exposure is worth 22 of the 100 in the youth index, the smallest of the three components, because it is the one built entirely out of claims rather than out of prices and policies. It is not graded at all in the adult index, for the reason set out under the adult profile, so everything in this section describes youth listings.

We do not rate exposure. We record which of these the organizer publishes, and weight them by how far each one actually carries a player — a scout in the stands is worth more than a photographer on the glass, and the gap between the two ends of this table is deliberately wide.

A listing that publishes none of them scores 11 of 22 — the middle of the range, the same treatment every other unknown in the product gets. The published half has to be earned: all 7 features reach 22. Running it this way also avoids a result that would be indefensible. Weighted from zero instead, an organizer who mentioned only professional photography would score below one who mentioned nothing at all, which would punish the more forthcoming of the two. Here a listing can only ever move up by publishing something. The honest cost of that choice is that the component separates events over 11 points rather than 22.

Two things this component is not. It is not a claim that scouts will watch your player: it reports that the organizer says scouts attend, which is why every listing also names the features the organizer left unstated, so you know what to ask before you book. And it is not a judgement about young or recreational events. A 10U house tournament has no recruiting relevance and offering none is not a fault, which is exactly why silence sits at the midpoint instead of at zero.

Entry fees are stored in the organizer’s own currency, in minor units, and always displayed that way first. To rank events against each other we convert to USD using a fixed reference table rather than a live feed. A comparison table that reshuffles itself on a quarter-point of FX movement is less useful than one that is consistently approximate, and no team’s decision turns on 1.5% of exchange rate. Treat USD equivalents as indicative and the local figure as authoritative.

1 USD

1.00 USD

1 CAD

0.74 USD

1 EUR

1.09 USD

1 GBP

1.28 USD

1 AUD

0.66 USD

1 MXN

0.05 USD

1 BRL

0.18 USD

1 AED

0.27 USD

Reference table last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Two sources, both labelled on every listing. Most records were compiled by our research team from the organizer’s own public event page — fee, dates, guaranteed games, refund wording, divisions. The rest were submitted by organizers directly, which also claims the record if we had already written one.

A verified marker means we have confirmed the organization runs the event it claims to run. It is not a quality judgement — a verified organizer can still score poorly, and several do.

We cover 12 sports — ice hockey, soccer, american football, lacrosse, baseball, basketball, volleyball, tennis, pickleball, golf, boxing, martial arts — filed under 6 regions: United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Asia-Pacific, and in two divisions: youth and adult.

Cost medians are computed per sport, never pooled across them: a hockey weekend and a basketball weekend do not share a price floor. They are computed per division as well, for the same reason read one step further. An adult roster paying a few hundred dollars between them and a 14U team paying a few thousand are not choosing between each other, so pooling the two would move the figure both are measured against — half the youth index would read as a bargain and every adult listing as dear, on nothing but how many of each we happen to have filed. A sport-and-division bucket needs at least 4 listings with a published team price before it gets a median of its own; below that the listing is measured against its sport as a whole and the detail page says which of the two was used. A median over one or two listings is not a market, it is those listings grading themselves.

Medians are not computed per region, so a cheap regional market reads as good value against its sport worldwide.

What that adds up to — how many listings are filed per sport and region, the two classes of competition we deliberately leave out, and which cells are still empty — is set out separately, because it is a question about the index rather than about the arithmetic. What is in the index, and what is not.

Reviews come from coaches, team managers, parents, players, officials and scouts. Every one lands in a moderation queue and affects nothing — no rating, no ranking, no average — until a human has read it. We check that the reviewer is describing the event they say they attended and that the criticism is about the tournament rather than a named child, referee or opposing coach.

Organizers can correct factual errors in their listing. They cannot edit, reorder or remove a review, and they cannot file one that counts. The order of the table is the GameVoyaGrade, and the GameVoyaGrade is the arithmetic on this page.

Organizers can pay for tools, exposure, verification and insight. They cannot pay for a grade.

Listing is free and permanent. GameVoya Listed carries the full 100-point GameVoyaGrade, open reviews and the right to correct anything factual we got wrong, and every event our researchers compiled is on it whether or not the organizer has ever contacted us. This used to be a per-event verification fee; charging for the baseline made the comparison worse, because the events most worth comparing are the ones nobody has paid us to include.

There are three paid products a visitor will see the effect of. A GameVoya Verified subscription at $149 a month, or GameVoya Pro at $349, or the same thing for a single tournament at $249 paid once — which buys the organizer control of their own record, a verified marker once we have confirmed they run the event, and the ability to answer a review in public, labelled — never to edit or remove one. GameVoya Certified from $750 per event per year, an inspection across ten areas that is paid for whether or not it ends in a certificate. And a GameVoya Spotlight placement at $149 per tournament, which lifts one listing into a labelled band above the ranked index on searches it matches and into a featured band on the homepage. A fourth product, registration referrals at 4% or $35 per registered team, is published but not yet open.

We are describing all of it on the methodology page because a paid placement a visitor has to discover is a trick rather than an advertisement, and because the interesting part is not the price list but the list below it. Five things nothing we sell can buy, every one enforced in code rather than by policy:

• A better GameVoyaGrade. The grader never reads a plan, a fee or a certificate. Publishing more facts moves a grade; paying us does not.
• A better Attendee Rating. It is a moderated average of what attending teams and scouts filed. Organizers cannot file one, and no tier can edit or remove one.
• A higher rank. Sponsored events are lifted into a labelled band above the table, never sorted up inside it. The ranked order is the grade’s.
• A place in a search you do not match. Filters run before placements. Filter to soccer and a sponsored hockey event is absent.
• Publication. Paid or free, a submission joins the same moderation queue, and a claim that is not on your own event page is corrected or refused.

Concretely, on the arithmetic above: a subscribed, certified, sponsored listing is graded by exactly the same three components out of the same 100 points as a curated listing filed by a researcher, and its Attendee Rating is the moderated average of what attending teams and scouts wrote. Verification is worth points to nobody’s wallet — it is not one of the 4 gradeable facts, because it is ours to award rather than the organizer’s to publish. Curated listings we compiled ourselves are never invoiced for anything.

There is no other advertising in the index, and no fee of any kind attaches to a review. Reviews come from teams, are moderated on the queue described above, and an organizer cannot pay to have one softened or removed. The whole price list names every stream we have priced, including the ones that are not built, and the specific mechanism that keeps each one away from these two numbers.

• Whether the age bracket you enter is competitive. A U13 AA division can be excellent at an event whose U11 division is a mess, and one rating covers both.
• Whether an event with a high GameVoyaGrade is well run. The grade reads the published record, which is why every letter label says “on paper”. A weekend can be honestly priced, generously refundable and chaotic on the day, and only the Attendee Rating will ever say so.
• What the weekend costs in total. Neither rating reads anything but the entry fee and the published block policy. A season in the team planner will total the rooms you record beside the fees, but it does so outside both ratings — travel, meals and ice time before you leave are still yours to add.
• Whether last year’s operation is this year’s. Reviews carry the year they describe, and a new tournament director can change everything in one season.
• Anything about events not yet in the index. Absence from the table is not a verdict.