Quickly providing good matchups

A tournament method, comprising the steps of:

• receiving tournament registrations from a plurality of game consoles for tournament entrants;
• ranking said plurality of registered entrants;
• sequentially grouping a subset of said ranked entrants for participation in a game session in a first round of said tournament;
• reranking said entrants based on performance in said first round;
• and
• sequentially grouping a subset of said reranked entrants in a game session in a second round of said tournament, wherein when determining whether to add an entrant to a group, a check is made to determine whether a window factor of time has elapsed since the entrant last played in a game session with any member of the group.

A leaderboard qualified tournament method, comprising the steps of:

• posting a challenge definition for a game program, said challenge definition including a plurality of game session criteria to qualify for a tournament;
• receiving game session results from a plurality of game consoles of players attempting to qualify for said tournament;
• ranking said received game session results and informing players of their current rank;
• sending in-game notifications to players when their previously-qualifying score becomes a non-qualifying score as a result of subsequent player scores, and allowing said notified players to retry to qualify;
• and
• closing the qualification period and conducting said tournament using said qualified entrants.