Tippmania from front to back

There are three ways in. Two lead into an existing promotion, the third into one of your own.

An invitation by email

The controlled route. The President enters an address and sets the role along with it; a link then lands in the inbox. On first entry you choose your ring name and password. An invitation is valid for fourteen days and can be withdrawn.

If you already have an account, you can join a further promotion with it. The account stays the same, the membership is added.

A join code or QR code

The convenient route: the code sits in the group chat, lies on the table or hangs on a wall. Whoever has it may join – which is why it only ever grants the Contender role, never one of President and Chief Content Officer. A slip of paper passed around would otherwise give away the whole promotion.

The page does not join on its own, it asks first: “You are joining X” with a button underneath. A link in a group chat should not pull anyone in unnoticed.

A code needs an existing account – if you do not have one yet, you land on the sign-in page first. It expires after a set period and can be withdrawn at any time; after that even a QR code already printed out stops working. And anyone removed from a promotion cannot get back in with the same code.

Starting your own promotion

If you have nothing with Tippmania yet, you set up your own promotion: email and the name you want, nothing else. The name applies across everyone and therefore has to still be free; the form checks that while you type.

The form always gives the same answer, whether the address is known or not. Which of the two applies is in the email, not on the screen – otherwise the form could be used to find out who has an account here.

The promotion is only created when the link is clicked; until then it is merely reserved, and the reservation lapses after a week. Whoever starts a promotion runs it and plays along. The first season is set up by hand afterwards – name and year are a decision, not a guess. The year may also be left off: if you number your seasons rather than date them, you hide it.

You sign in with your email address

Not with your ring name. The reason is practical: two promotions may hand out the same ring name, and an ambiguous login is not a login. The ring name is the name you appear under in the game – not the key to the door.

A password needs at least eight characters, upper and lower case, a digit and a special character. The app will not take your last two again. For “forgot password” either ring name or email will do; the mail goes to the address on file and only shows it masked, so that a ring name never reveals somebody else’s address.

After 30 minutes without activity the app signs you out by itself. A minute beforehand a notice appears with a “Stay signed in” button – in the middle of an event, typing your password is the last thing you want. On a borrowed device signing out is what you want, on your own it is mildly annoying; but no account is left lying around open.

Three levels that build on each other:

• Promotion – the frame for everything else. Everything that lasts longer than a season hangs here: the House Rules, belt history, Hall of Fame and chat.
• Season – across several events an overall winner is decided. Exactly one season runs per promotion at a time.
• Event – the single night with its questionnaire.

Anyone playing in several promotions has separate profiles there: two ring names, two avatars, two scores. At the top of the app you switch which promotion is currently meant. Your role applies per promotion as well – you can be the Chief Content Officer in one and simply play along in the other.

The promotions are completely separated. Events, questions, picks, standings, comments and chats of one promotion stay inside it; when you switch, you see the other half of your Tippmania and nothing else. The only shared parts are those that apply to everyone anyway: the leagues and the match cards from Wikipedia.

That is also why every notification carries its origin up front – “Tippmaniacster · New event”. The inbox runs across all promotions, and a “New event” without a sender could not be placed when you are in two.

The word “league” means something else – the actual wrestling promotion an event belongs to (WWE, AEW, NJPW, TNA, NXT, Ring of Honor). That is a property of the event, not a promotion in the Tippmania sense. AEW is a league; the circle of friends picking on AEW events is a promotion.

You see the league on every event: on a small square badge carrying its abbreviation, and on the arena picture behind the title. The colouring deliberately goes no further – the app stays gold, silver, black and bronze. Otherwise it would change its looks with every night.

How a league looks can be changed by the President for their own promotion – see Backstage.

Five main sections, at the bottom on a phone and on the side on a computer:

• Start – what is coming up: the next event, the countdown, who has already submitted.
• Picks – every event of the season, open and finished.
• Standings – where the running season stands.
• Statistics – the analysis behind the score.
• Profile – ring name, avatar, Championships, settings.

Alongside those, Messages, House Rules and History as side routes – needed less often, so not in the main bar, but not hidden either. The bell at the top leads to notifications.

Above every page it says where you are: the name of the promotion and the running season. With two promotions that is not decoration – “Standings” alone does not say whose standings you are looking at.

An event opens from Start or Picks. Inside is the questionnaire: the matches of the night and the bonus questions that go with them.

Fill it in in any order, and every answer is saved immediately. There is no submit button you could forget. As long as the deadline has not been reached, you can change anything as often as you like.

The countdown runs at the top. If you have not submitted, you get a reminder in good time – how often and when is set in the notification settings in your profile.

You cannot see what the others pick

Before the deadline the app does not hand out other people’s picks. All you can see is who has already submitted, not what.

A wrestling night asks differently from a matchday. So every type has its own input and its own scoring:

• Match – winner: Who wins? “Draw / No-Contest” is always among the options, even if nobody picks it.
• Single choice: Several options, exactly one is correct.
• Multiple choice: Several correct answers. Points per hit – a miss costs nothing, so guessing is worth it.
• Time range: How long does the match last? You pick a span; the real duration decides whose span fits.
• Estimate: A free number. Only the closest pick scores. Who wins at an equal distance is set by the Chief Content Officer per question – it says so on the question.
• Ordering: Sort the entries. One point per correct position, not all or nothing.
• Name X …: Several free entries, for example “name five wrestlers returning tonight”. Scored by hand.
• Open question: Free text with no fixed answer. The Chief Content Officer awards the points.
• Multiple fields: Related sub-questions – who pins, who gets pinned. Each field is scored on its own.
• Bingo: A grid of events. Points come per complete row or column, not per ticked box.

How many points a question is worth is stated on the question itself. They are not all equal.

While an event is still a draft, the Chief Content Officer can ask the Contenders for bonus questions. When that is open, the entry point appears under Picks – and only then.

A suggestion consists of the question and, depending on the type, the answer options. The answer is not part of it: the Chief Content Officer adds that later, otherwise your own suggestion would be your own cheat sheet.

Some events limit how many suggestions someone may submit – sometimes even split by question type. The page shows what is still open. Rejected and withdrawn suggestions release their slot again.

You get a message about acceptance or rejection, with a reason in case of rejection. Accepted questions may still be reworded by the Chief Content Officer – the original wording is kept as a record.

At the set time it is over. After that nobody takes anything back, and nobody adds anything either.

That is not a matter of good manners but of construction: the deadline is enforced by the database, not by the interface. Even someone bypassing the page and talking to the server directly would not get past it. A pick you could change afterwards would not be a pick.

At the same moment visibility flips: from now on all picks are open to everyone, and the answers appear as soon as they are entered.

Looking at somebody else’s tip card

From then on a tip card menu sits above the questionnaire: my picks or the ring name of somebody else. Pick one and the same list of questions shows their answers – browsing, not comparing. And you can tell you are on somebody else’s card: the name is above the list, in the progress line and on every answer row.

Before the deadline the menu is not there. Not hidden – there is simply nothing to choose from, because the database does not hand out other people’s picks beforehand.

After the event the Chief Content Officer enters the results. Much of it works itself out – for time-range questions the real duration is enough, for estimates the real number. Free text and “name X …” are scored by hand, identical answers from several people in one go.

Then scoring runs. A night’s score consists of:

• match points – from the questions about the matches
• bonus points – from the remaining questions
• stipulation points – only if somebody did not submit at all (see Not submitting at all)

Why past seasons stay put

Points are written down when scoring runs, not recalculated on every visit. If the House Rules change later, that does not retroactively alter a finished season. A season that was played once stays as it was played.

The correction window

If a mistake turns up afterwards, the Chief Content Officer can correct it and score again – but not forever. When scoring, he sets how long that stays possible: a number of days (seven is suggested) or not at all. After that, questions, answers and a rerun of the scoring are locked.

The window is the time for objections – “that question was ambiguous”. Long enough for a round of discussion in the chat, short enough that nobody is still tinkering with last winter next summer. Otherwise every standing, every belt and every Hall of Fame entry would hang on a state that could still shift a year later without anyone noticing.

Shorter yes, longer no. A running window can be pulled forward when scoring again; a longer figure changes nothing. Otherwise “seven more days” would be true again after every rerun, and the window would promise something it does not keep.

An empty sheet is a different thing from a bad one. What happens in that case is decided by the Chief Content Officer at the start of the season – beforehand, not when the case arises. Seven forms are available:

• 0 points – the night counts as zero, nothing else happens.
• Average of the night – you get what the others scored on average.
• Share of the lowest scorer – a percentage of the points of the weakest person who did submit.
• Suspension – 0 points, and no submissions for the next events.
• Penalty points – 0 points for the night plus a deduction from the overall score.
• Immediate exclusion – out of the running season.
• Warning, then exclusion – a yellow card per missed submission; once the agreed number is reached, the red one follows.

The form in force is in the House Rules. During a running season it can only be changed within limits and not single-handedly – the Contenders have a right of veto.

Where the running season stands: place, points, progress. Clicking a name leads to that person’s player page with their results.

Anyone sitting out a season does not disappear from the promotion but appears below the table with a dash. No score, but no gap in the list either.

The analysis behind the score. Four figures at the top: your own rank and the size of the field, your total points, and how they split into match and bonus.

Overall table

The season’s table, sortable by every column. Next to match, bonus and total points it carries W and L: events as first and events as last. A shared place counts for everyone involved; anyone who did not submit on a night collects neither.

If the stipulation has hit somebody, a column is added – replacement points with a plus, penalty points with a minus. Without it the row would not add up: the total is match plus bonus plus stipulation, and anyone seeing only the first two would think it wrong.

Season progress

One line per Contender, place after every event – first place is at the top. That shows who stayed in front all season and who fought their way up; a snapshot cannot. Total points are in the tooltip, your own line is gold and carries your picture at the current position.

Where you stand

The standings as bars, split into match and bonus points – two people on the same total may have got there in completely different ways. Next to it your own split as a ring.

What it comes down to

Your own points twice, cut differently: by league – does WWE suit you better than NJPW? – and by question type on average, so whether estimates pay off or ordering costs you. If you would rather read numbers than bars, open “the numbers” below: answers, points and average per question type.

All of it refers to the running season

And within it only to scored events – a running one only feeds in once it has been scored. So the statistics are not a lifetime record but the state of this season.

What came before is under History: the final tables of past seasons, along with their progress, points by league and the specialists of the season – who mastered which question type. Searchable, and unchanged. At the foot, the Hall of Fame.

The profile holds your ring name, avatar and your Signature Line – the saying that appears as a quote in your profile and runs under your name in the standings. Plus your Championships as a cabinet and your own record.

For an avatar there are 99 pixel wrestlers to choose from – or a picture of your own if none of them fit. Either works, and either can be swapped at any time.

If you are in several promotions, you keep this separately per promotion. Only what concerns the account itself – email, password, notifications – applies everywhere.

Sitting out a season

If you do not want to play a season, you say so in your profile. When the next season starts the request is applied; you then do not appear in the scoring but stay a member of the promotion and of the chat.

You can only take that back until the season’s first deadline. Not afterwards – otherwise you could wait and see how the night goes and then decide whether you had been playing.

At the end of a season the books are settled, and the belts carry real title names:

• Undisputed Universal Championship – first place, the gold.
• Continental Championship – second place, silver.
• Cruiserweight Championship – third place, bronze.
• Loserweight Championship – last place. That stays too.

The belts pile up in the profile over the years, in the cabinet under Championships. Tapping a belt shows when it was won. Closing your account does not remove you from the record: your tally moves to the Hall of Fame so the tables of past seasons stay complete.

Beyond that the President can award Championships retrospectively – for placings from before the app, so a promotion can bring its own prehistory with it.

Leaving one promotion and stopping with Tippmania are two different things, and the app keeps them apart.

Leaving a promotion

This affects that one promotion only. The dividing line follows the question of what belongs to whom: picks belong to the person and go along – answers, scores, comments, chat messages, submitted questions and the titles won there. Events belong to the promotion and stay – the events, the questions, the House Rules and the seasons remain, even the ones you set up yourself.

Other memberships are untouched by this. If you are in two promotions and leave one, you carry on in the other, with the same account and the same password.

On leaving you can choose whether an entry stays behind in the Hall of Fame. It also keeps your ring name taken – without it the name becomes available again.

Deleting your account

That is leaving every promotion at once, and afterwards the account itself is gone, along with the email address and password. If you are the only one left in your promotion, it goes with you.

Being removed

The President can take somebody out of the promotion. As a rule that takes two people: the President files the request, a Chief Content Officer agrees to it. If there is no independent second – because the Chief Content Officer is the one filing or the one affected – the check is skipped. It guards against arbitrariness, not against being on your own.

Being removed creates no Hall of Fame entry. Remembering yourself is the person’s own choice, and being removed is not their choice. The ring name becomes available again.

Comments

They hang on the event and sit right where the picking happens. For whatever comes up during and after the night.

Chat

Under Messages: a group chat for everyone, plus one-to-one conversations. The group chat belongs to the promotion, not to a single season – it survives the turn of the year. “Group” really does mean group chat here and not the promotion.

Notifications

The bell collects what happened: a new event, the deadline drawing near, scoring done, somebody commented. Which of those also go to your phone as a push is set in your profile – each kind can be switched off individually.

Several events with the same reference are merged into one unread message. Five comments in one night ring once, not five times.

Under House Rules you find what applies among you: scoring, deadlines, how missed submissions are handled. A single rule is called a Rule; they are maintained by the Chief Content Officer.

They apply to the whole promotion, not to a single season. So they outlast the turn of the year, and an archived event carries the same Rules as everywhere else.

Every change is recorded – with the old wording, the new wording and the time. A rule that can change unnoticed is not a rule; and anyone who wants to know what applied at the event in March can look it up.

Inside an event they are one tap away: there they open as an overlay so you do not have to leave the page while picking. The veto against the stipulation and the change log stay on their own page.

Tippmania runs in the browser but can be placed like an app. It then starts without an address bar and can send push notifications.

• iPhone: open it in Safari, share icon, “Add to Home Screen”. Other browsers on iOS do not offer this.
• Android: open it in Chrome, menu, “Install app” or “Add to Home screen”.
• Computer: the install icon on the right of the address bar in Chrome or Edge.

Push has to be allowed once, and per device. Agreeing on your phone does not mean you have allowed it on your computer.

Every promotion has three roles, and they are named like the roles in a real wrestling promotion. That is not a gimmick: anyone reading along should see from the title what it is about.

• Contender – plays. The role everyone has who is not currently running things.
• Chief Content Officer – runs the game.
• President – runs the promotion.

The latter two are responsibilities that do not overlap. No hierarchy – neither stands above the other:

• Chief Content Officer – the game: create events, write questions, set deadlines, enter results, run scoring, maintain the House Rules and the stipulation.
• President – the promotion: invite and remove members, assign roles, start, rename and end a season, add Championships after the fact, set how the leagues look.

Anyone who is only the President cannot reach the game area – not even to read it. That is not a convenience of the interface but set in the database: whoever administers the promotion should not be able to see the questions in advance.

One account may still be both. If you work Backstage and also play, you switch the view at the top – between President and Chief Content Officer/Contender. The view controls what you see – not what you are allowed to do.

There is exactly one President per promotion. The role is handed over, not granted: it moves from one person to another in one step, so there are never two and never none. With the Chief Content Officer it is different – there may be several, and that is what the stand-in below builds on.

Both apply per promotion. If you are in two promotions you do not bring your role with you: in one you can be the Chief Content Officer, in the other a Contender like everyone else.

Standing in, and stepping down

Running the game no longer hangs on the President alone. A Chief Content Officer can appoint a stand-in – on holiday, when ill, or simply because somebody else has the time right now. Before, the President had to step in.

A stand-in is an as well as, not an instead of. Whoever appoints one keeps their own role – otherwise they could not take it back, and that is the whole point. Afterwards both have the same rights: events, questions, results, House Rules.

Only the person who appointed them can take it back – and the President, who grants and revokes every role anyway. So a stand-in cannot remove the one who appointed them.

And anyone who has had enough steps down. Backstage is then closed to them; picks and points are untouched. Only the President can bring them back – or their own stand-in, whose role remains. Stepping down works even if nobody holds the role afterwards: an office you cannot leave is not an office. That there are no new events until somebody is appointed is the honest consequence.

Bringing people in

Two tools, meant for different situations. An invitation goes to an address and carries the role with it – the route when you know who you want. A join code works for anyone who has it and grants the Contender role only.

The President creates a code with a lifetime in days and a maximum number of joins; zero means unlimited. It can be passed on as a link or as a QR code to download. For a group chat the link is the better tool – whoever is reading along has their phone in their hand already and cannot scan their own screen. The QR belongs on paper, on a wall or on a projector.

Only one code is active per promotion at a time. Withdrawing it ends it immediately; anyone who has already joined with it stays a member.

How the leagues look

Under Anzeige the President sets how a league appears in their promotion: the three colours of its badge – frame, fill, text – and which of the three arena pictures sits behind the event title. The choices are the bare arena, the same one with the Tippmania mark, and the same one with the league’s own mark.

This applies to your own promotion only. The leagues themselves are the same for everyone – AEW is AEW everywhere – but the choice is not: another promotion keeps its colours even when these are changed.

Only the deviation from the standard is remembered, not the whole set of values. That is why “Standard” always leads back – per league or for all of them – and back to the current design rather than to a colour copied down at some point. The abbreviation itself cannot be changed: colours and header picture hang on it, and a promotion renaming “WWE” would lose both.

Dissolving a promotion

Only possible while no season is running – end it first, then dissolve. And the same second pair of eyes applies as when removing a member: a Chief Content Officer has to agree, provided there is an independent one.

The match card comes from Wikipedia

When creating an event, nobody has to type out the bouts. Which events are coming up and which matches are announced is pulled from the leagues’ Wikipedia articles. The card usually appears there three to four weeks before the night – so the sync can be repeated until it is there. A card copied from cagematch can be pasted in instead.

Two things the sync does not do: it does not pull in the answer – after the event Wikipedia rewrites the same card into results, and the app recognises exactly that and then takes nothing. And it does not overwrite anything: a repeated sync only adds what is missing, existing questions and the picks made on them stay untouched. Nothing is adopted on its own anyway – every question goes through the Chief Content Officer.

The draft as a preview

While an event is a draft, nobody but the people running the game sees it. They now see it the way it will look later, though: the finished card with all the questions, instead of picturing it from the editor.

Nothing is given away. The answers stay empty for them too – a draft is never revealed. That is what makes the preview honest: it shows the event as the Contenders will see it and not one bit more. Nothing can be picked inside it.

I forgot to submit my picks.

That cannot happen. Every answer is saved immediately, there is no submit button.

Can I see what the others picked?

Only after the deadline. Before that the app hands out nobody’s picks, not even to the Chief Content Officer.

I made a mistake and the deadline has passed.

Then it stands. That is exactly what the deadline is for. Only the Chief Content Officer can step in for a genuine error, and that goes on the record afterwards – and only while the event’s correction window is still running.

Does Tippmania cost anything?

No. The app is completely free and ad-free for everyone, with no subscription and no paywall. If you like, drop a coffee in the coffee fund and help with the server costs – entirely voluntary, and it unlocks nothing.

Can I take part with my own group?

Yes. In the app “Start your own promotion” leads there: enter your email and the name you want, open the link from the mail, done. After that the promotion is yours – your own seasons, your own House Rules, your own standings – and you bring your people in by invitation or join code.

I was given a QR code. What do I do with it?

Scan it or open the link. The page shows which promotion it is about and asks first – you only join with the button. If you do not have an account yet, you land on the sign-in page before that.

Can I play in several groups?

Yes, with the same account. In each promotion you have your own profile and your own score; you switch at the top of the app. The promotions see nothing of each other.

What happens to my data if I stop?

That depends on whether you leave one promotion or stop altogether – both are under Leaving and stopping. In short: your picks and points go with you, the promotion’s events stay put, and if you want it, an entry in the Hall of Fame keeps the old tables complete – without an account, without an email address.

Tippmania is a place for wrestling and for the circle picking together. What has no place here is in this chapter – short, and with no room for interpretation.

Racism, homophobia and discrimination of any kind are ruled out. That applies in the chat and in comments, in the choice of ring names and promotion names – and in how you treat each other.

Equally ruled out is anything sexual involving minors. In any form, in any context, including as an allusion or a joke.

Breaches lead to immediate deletion of the account. Not after a warning, not after weighing it up – and regardless of which promotion it happened in.

In relevant cases the operator reserves the right to take criminal action and will report the matter to the authorities.

If you come across anything like this, report it to the Chief Content Officer of your promotion or directly to the operator – the address is on the contact page.