Chesstivus
Built for Acid Chess Club — a tournament OS that lets them run their whole comp over the phone.
Acid Chess Club runs live chess tournaments for a crowd, and needed a way to manage two concurrent 64-player brackets without a laptop and a check-in desk slowing the room down. I built them Chesstivus — a tournament OS that lets the whole competition run off a phone: seeding, live bracket propagation, mobile result-reporting for hosts, and a public viewer overlaying match data onto the club's own hand-drawn tournament-sheet artwork. Built on Next.js and Supabase, and rehearsed end-to-end at full scale (128 players, real hosts, real results) before the actual night.
The brief
Acid Chess Club needed to run two chess tournaments, Chill and Hectic, back to back, on one night, with volunteer hosts who'd never used the tool before and no time to explain it twice. The brief was to get the entire competition running over the phone — no laptop, no check-in desk — seeding players, generating a fair bracket, letting hosts report results from their phones one-handed, and showing a live public bracket that made sense to a room full of spectators — while staying resilient to the things that actually happen at a live event: late arrivals, disputed results, and a host mis-tapping a button in a loud room.
The approach
Three surfaces, one Supabase-backed source of truth: an admin console for seeding, overrides, and host management; a mobile-first host view built and tested at real phone widths (390×844) rather than just resized in a desktop browser; and a public viewer that renders the live bracket directly on top of the tournament's own poster artwork. Before the real event, both brackets were run to completion end-to-end through the actual UI at full scale — 128 players, real hosts reporting real results — which caught bugs (like a table quietly hosting two simultaneous matches, or a "waiting for next round" message that was actually permanent) that a smaller test never would have.
