To find Open Chess Tournaments to play in, users can go to the Game Menu - Join Tournaments which opens the Activites window to the Tournaments Tab.
The times of the regularly scheduled chess tournaments can be seen( all times Eastern USA time or New York Time) by going in Lantern's menu to Game / Tournament Schedule. Some tournaments require you have at least 10 or 20 chess games played in that rating category. For example for Cooly it's Blitz rating to join. Tomato uses challenge based ratings of Bullet ( times under 3 minutes) Blitz ( 3 minutes to under 15 minutes) and Standard ( 15 minutes and up) also Wild for any variant chess. These games can be played by going to Window's menu / Seek graph or Game / seek a game.
When a round starts if the user is paired there will be a suggest popup at start of round for who to challenge. If the opponent then challenges first, there will be a challenge popup to replace the suggestion popup. "match name" is always printed as a clickable hyperlink on channel tab of tournament channel where the text shows the round starting.
When you join a tournament the channel will be added if the user is not in it. To prevent if the user wants the bot from removing the channel at end of tournament type for example /tell tomato set auto_chan off.
One can also use the command line to find open tournaments to join to play in. Users can query the bots for the tournaments they are running. To do this type in M0 or any tab on command (> selected bottom left of console) /tell 220 tourn. This sends a message to a private channel that others wont see and the bots will respond on that tab. Example it may return:
Tomato late WEEKDAY BLITZ SERIES #1! [SW br 5 0] Rnd 2/5/Late:4 Players:16 Mgr:Bullitproof
If it says open or late vs closed the user can try to join by typing /tell bot join or /tell bot latejoin. In this case the user would type /tell Tomato latejoin.