Facebook Gaming has opened early access to Facebook Gaming tournaments, a feature to help people stay connected through games.

"Gaming is all about friendly competition, and Facebook Gaming tournaments help bring that experience to everyone wherever they are, whatever game they’re playing," Facebook says.

Tournaments will let users create and organize virtual tournaments in a variety of formats, from double elimination to round-robin.

Organizers will be able to invite participants and run a tournament from start to finish including registration (singles or teams), seeding, bracket management and score entry. Facebook is also planning to support the Swiss format and other desired formats.

In order to create a tournament, head to fb.gg/tournaments. You can create several tournaments tied to one event. You can fill in date and location, tournament type, game being played and invite participants.

If a user doesn’t have a Facebook account, a tournament organizer can still register them for the event by entering their gamer tag. Using a Facebook profile will allow access features such as bracket/notifications.

Stations can help you manage larger scale events by assigning matches to individual setups. Tap on a match to select it, and you’ll be able to assign a station to it. Once you enter a score for that match, the station will automatically be free for use for another match.

The iOS Facebook App, Android Facebook App and Desktop/Web browsers all support tournaments.

The product is built directly into the Facebook Gaming platform itself, which means that creators can host fan tournaments and stream them, too. They can even take advantage of Facebook’s fundraising tools to donate any money raised directly to relief organizations.

Tournaments is debuting in early access.