Eight announced stages tracked by game, region and source confidence

Stage order in four soft bands. Operators publish four named bands per season. The desk mirrors those bands so the horizon ledger and the editorial coverage line up cleanly with the operator's terminology.

Each named band carries a stage-card format, a roster lock window and a coverage window. The desk reads the operator's band definition before publishing the editorial copy, and notes the band definitions on the evidence register against the date they were verified. Bands rotate at season boundaries — the desk publishes a season-boundary summary when the new bands drop, with editorial dates the operator pages list.

What the desk will not publish

The desk does not invent stage names, formats or bands. If an operator has not published a band, the desk waits. The desk will not extend the season by extrapolating unmatched bands; speculative entries are flagged and routed to the open-questions column on the briefing queue rather than used to fill the horizon ledger.

What the desk reads on the operator page

The operator page is the editorial spine for the tournaments route. The desk reads the band definitions, the regional qualifiers, the open-cup eligibility windows and the timing of the bracket draw. When the operator page is updated, the desk re-derives the four bands from the new page and notes the verification time on the evidence register.

The published copy on this page mirrors the operator's terminology wherever possible. If the operator calls a stage the “Upper Bracket,” that is what the desk calls it. If the operator calls it the “Champions Stage,” the desk uses the operator's wording. The desk does not coin new stages in the published editorial copy; new stages appear only after the operator publishes them.

Three rows of pin colours. Each row on the desk's corkboard corresponds to a tier: ivory for confirmed, slate for announced, amber for speculative. The desk does not promote a speculative row to announced without operator confirmation.

Pins the desk will not use

The desk does not use red pins to mean “danger” or “cancelled.” A row is either removed (because the operator removed it) or downgraded (because the operator softened the language). The desk does not invent a fourth tier. The colour vocabulary stays at three so readers can map language to colour reliably across the site.

When the operator publishes a cancellation, the desk removes the row and posts a dated correction on the dispatch stream. The desk does not keep a cancelled row on the horizon for “tracking purposes” — the ledger is rebuilt from operator pages only.

How to read the colour pins in the editorial copy

When the editorial copy refers to a row, the copy uses the same vocabulary the pin colour indicates. A confirmed row is called confirmed in the copy. An announced row is called announced. A speculative row is called speculative. The desk does not paraphrase the tier to make the copy read more confident; the copy stays consistent with the pin.

The colour pins also appear on the briefing queue's dated entries. A speculative dispatch carries the amber pin in the editorial language. A confirmed dispatch carries the ivory pin. A pending dispatch carries the slate pin. The three-tier vocabulary is consistent across the site.

The first habit is to read the operator page before reading the trade press. The operator publishes the stage cards, the regional qualifiers, the open-cup eligibility windows and the timing of the bracket draw. Trade press interprets those facts but does not publish them, so reading the operator first means the desk is anchored on the source and only later enriches with interpretation. This also reduces the desk's risk of paraphrasing the trade press back as an operator page quote, which is one of the more embarrassing corrections other esports sites publish.

The second habit is to rate the horizon in two passes: a wide pass that lists every announced stage and a narrow pass that questions one assumption. The wide pass produces the horizon ledger the desk publishes. The narrow pass asks: what would make this announcement wrong? Until that question is answered, the desk treats the announcement as announced rather than confirmed. The narrow pass is what protects the reader from seeing the desk promote an announcement into the dispatch queue and then have to retract the line.

The third habit is to time the edits against the operator's publishing cycle. The operator pages update on weekday mornings in most regions, and the desk reads the cycle in the morning and emits dispatches in the afternoon. Readers who watch the dispatch stream in the morning see a quieter feed; readers who watch in the afternoon see the day's changes. The cadence is intentional, not accidental — it gives the desk the morning to verify before letting the dispatch line escape into a reader's browser tab.

Where the desk diverges from coverage that mirrors trade-press reads is on the rating vocabulary. The desk uses three colours for the confirmation pin and three-tier language in the editorial copy. A reader who reads the desk for three weeks starts to see the language map onto the colours map onto the publish date, and that consistency is what gives the desk's horizon ledger the editorial credibility readers come back for. The desk does not invent a fourth colour to make a single announcement read more urgent; the colour stays at three so the vocabulary stays tight.

The desk also treats the horizon as a working document. Rows move up the tier ladder when sources agree; rows that fall off the operator page get removed, not retained as a footnote. The ledger is rebuilt from operator pages only. A row the desk kept for "tracking purposes" is a row the reader cannot verify, so the desk removes rather than retains. This is sometimes the slower choice; it is always the more honest choice. Readers who want a fuller view can add operator pages to their own bookmarks.

Editorial cycle: weekday-morning source-scan, weekday-afternoon narrative-edit, weekly patch workshop. Verification timestamps on the dispatch stream.