Header photo credit: Sydia (TBD5, 2025)

It’s 2025, and despite the universe’s best efforts, competitive gaming continues to exist. If you have also continued to exist and want to hit the next level of live tournament commentary, this article is for you.

This article assumes that you’ve already read the brilliant DDR Tournament Commentary Guide from 2018. If not, go read it! If you need a refresher, here you go:

1. Don’t talk about yourself
2. Don’t talk about yourself (seriously)
3. During the match, talk about the match
4. Help viewers follow the action
5. Talk up the players
6. Use player handles, not real names
7. Don’t trash Konami
8. Cater to the casual viewer

These are all essential rules for commentators of all skill levels to follow. But you’re familiar with them now, so let’s talk about the next level.

You Represent Everyone. Act Like It.

When you are on air, you represent the tournament, the venue, the staff, and the community at large. This is non-negotiable. Keep it PG unless the staff explicitly tells you otherwise. Don’t talk trash or pick fights, and for the love of everything don’t be edgy or horny. Act like your grandma is watching.

Prepare!

Commentary is hard. Being on the desk takes focus, effort, and attention. You need to use everything you’ve got on show day, which means you need to prepare ahead of time. Know your strengths as a commentator (more on that below), and know how you’re going to flex those muscles. Look into who’s entering the tournament and who you’ll likely be commentating for. Understand the tournament format, overall rules, and the flow of the event. The impact it will have on your comfort and flow is unbeatable.

Know your strengths

Everyone has their own voice, knowledge, and experiences to bring to the desk. It’s important to know who YOU are and rely on what you’re good at, rather than trying to be something you’re not. Maybe you have great knowledge of charts and can set viewers’ expectations on what’s coming ahead of the start of the song. Maybe you’re a fast talker and can give rapid-fire play-by-play during a song. Maybe you know players really well and can talk about their strengths and weaknesses, where they’re from, and their DDR journey. Whatever it may be, spend some time before the event (see above) thinking about what those strengths are and how to apply them on the desk. Be ready to communicate this to your partner ahead of time so you can work out the best way to collaborate.

Know the tournament format

Saying something incorrect on stream is a surefire way to make everybody think you might be wrong about anything else you say for the rest of your shift. You don’t have to be an encyclopedia, but you DO need to know if this round is a best-of-three or best-of-five, what difficulties are in play, how long until the next round, and what happens next for each round’s winner and loser – the kinds of things that chat will ask you about if you don’t bring it up yourself. This is something you can figure out in 10-15 minutes once brackets and final rules are revealed. There’s no excuse for not knowing.

Take Notes

Don’t remember everything you might ever need to know about the game, the event, or anything else? Take notes! You can use your phone, a tablet, a second monitor on the streaming PC, whatever! Make notes on players, important topics to cover, or the difficulty levels per round. Have a tab open with the rules, with the bracket, with the Sanbai difficulty tier list, and with FinalOffset to talk about the sync on each song that comes up. Have some scratch paper and a pen to silently communicate with staff or your partner, and mark down things you want to bring up later. You can be as thorough or as loose as you want, but keeping notes will make you sound like a pro on the air.

Be exact with sponsor reads

You may be working at a tournament that has sponsors. That means it is your job to give them the airtime they paid for. The staff member in charge of commentary will know what exactly you need to do and when, so check with them ahead of time and make sure you’re hitting the mark. Defer to the sponsor’s requests completely. Tournaments do not run without money, and TOs pay all that money out of their own pocket unless they have sponsors. If you are given a script, read it exactly as written – if you want to add your own flavor or shoutouts to the sponsor, do it after the script.

Marketing and money is a big deal. Nailing sponsor reads will make them happy and let us all have more and bigger tournaments. Messing up a sponsor read can lead to angry sponsors, angry TOs, and less money. Take this seriously.

Work with your partner

You probably won’t be alone on the desk. Having a partner creates a natural conversation, fills in gaps in your strengths or knowledge, and takes a lot of the burden of commentary off of your shoulders. It can feel like some commentary duos naturally complement each other, but the best duos are ones that set each other up. This could be a book on its own, but a few key points I always keep in mind:

• Complete your thoughts with a period. Avoid trailing off and awkward semi-transitions like “….so yeah”. If this is hard for you to do naturally, just use a basic “in conclusion” finisher to conclude your thought. Example: “…and these will be the key moments in the upcoming match” or “…and that’s what Player A will need to do to win.”
  
• Pass the baton by asking questions. It can be hard to know how or when to jump in to a conversation as a commentator, so give your partner obvious transitions with open-ended questions or leading statements using their name, like “So Joe, what can you tell us about the players in Pool B?” Clearly handing them the opportunity, giving them a topic to start with, and then letting them run with it will give you the best results.
  
• Give your partner opportunities to use their strengths. You will know your partner’s strengths since you both prepared and discussed with each other before your shift (nudge nudge). If you are the chart knowledge person and they are the player knowledge person, hit them with a “So, what can you tell us about these two players?” to get them into their strength with a natural transition point. Then they can pass it back to you with “Now, how do you think these two players will handle the card draw ahead of them?” and you’re having a natural conversation that covers all the bases.

• Don’t take up all the air. Try to keep a loose sense of how close to (or far from) a 50-50 talking split you have over the last five or ten minutes. If you’ve been talking nonstop for a few minutes, finish your point quickly and give some air to your partner. A perfectly even split really isn’t necessary – even as much as 70-30 can be okay in the right context – but you need to make sure your partner has time to shine and you don’t sound like you’re full of yourself.

Manage dead time

You are going to have to kill some time as a commentator. Pads will need maintenance, ties will need to be broken, and start.gg will go down at least once. It may not be clear how long something will take, so it’s up to you to keep things feeling lively on stream and stop chat from getting bored or annoyed. In bullet point form:

• Set expectations. Tell people what’s going on and what needs to happen before the action returns. Saying “we’re going to be waiting for the TOs to complete maintenance on the 2P down arrow. We’ll keep you here with us until we get the signoff on the pads.” Try to avoid the “what are we waiting for?” in chat as much as possible.
  
• Stay on topic during breaks of less than five minutes. Talk about the last song that was played, or the card draw, or what’s at stake for the next song win or next match win. Keep people focused on the match and excited to see it come back.
  
• Transition to a related topic if you know the gap will be longer than five minutes. What have you seen so far over the course of the event, and how does that affect the next match? What is the state of the bracket, and what are the current match rules for the round you’re in? Setting the scene and building up hype is a great way to make dead time into fun time.
  
• Remind viewers every five-ish minutes of what is causing the delay, if there are any updates, and when you expect to be back to the match. If you don’t have anything new to add, just say “We’re still waiting on tournament staff to give us an update, and we’ll let you know as soon as we have more info.”
  
• Interrupt your conversation the moment there is a significant update. If the update is just “we’re still working on it”, let yourself or your partner finish their thought before letting the audience know.
  
• The longer you have to wait, the less formal you can get. This is a great time to start a conversation with chat – ask them to make tournament predictions, share their favorite highlights, or tell them to root for who they want to win in the next match.

Engage with chat

If you can see live chat while you’re commentating, you will always be tempted to read and respond to every message. There are times and situations where this can be good, and times where it is not good. While it’s a complicated topic, know that you can completely ignore chat if you want to. Do not feel pressured to respond, and you really shouldn’t respond to everything in any situation. That said, good chat engagement can turn a good stream into a great one. Here’s how I think about talking to chat during each phase of commentary.

Do not engage with chat during gameplay. Do not engage with chat immediately before or after gameplay. The focus should be entirely on the match at hand. No exceptions.

During the buildup to a match, limit your chat engagement to immediately relevant tournament or match info. I usually only will answer fundamental tournament info questions that will directly impact a match and you haven’t said already. If somebody asks if the bracket is double elimination, you can answer them. If you said that on air in the last five-ish minutes, don’t repeat yourself. Chat will usually take care of it, so don’t subject everybody else to a “yes, it’s double elimination” again and again because two different people have their volume muted.

In more flexible time, engage with chat how you are comfortable. You can have a conversation with people in chat if there’s interesting and relevant topics to discuss (e.g. How will the new charts impact the tournament? Who is the favorite to win?). Answering more broad questions can be done here as well – how many rounds are there, who plays tomorrow, when’s (other tournament), etc. If you do have the free time, you can lightly engage with jokes or silly business. Don’t get too off-topic. Keep your discussion about rhythm games, the event, past or upcoming matches, and the like. You can acknowledge good chat predictions, funny jokes, copypasta, or other semi-related discussion topics if you want and there’s an open space in the commentary, but don’t interrupt yourself or your partner to notice le epic meme.

If you see bad behavior in chat, either notify staff or directly intervene. You don’t need to be a backup chat moderator, but you must escalate bad stuff to staff to handle directly if you don’t handle it yourself. Don’t feed the trolls, but don’t let bad actors off. Don’t let chat bash players. You can always jump in with a “hey chat, let’s keep it positive” if things are getting salty.

You may have moderator access from the commentary desk. Check with staff about how they’d like you to use it before your shift.

Avoid repetition

When you have to talk for a long period of time, you’re going to start repeating yourself. This is natural and happens to everybody. A little bit is okay, but make sure you aren’t using the same reaction phrase over and over. If you aren’t a wordy person, you’ll need to prepare yourself to have a few different options for starting and ending a match, getting excited, and transitioning between phases (intro, card draw, gameplay, outro, etc). You don’t need to say something unique every single time, but rotating between 3-4 different ways to say the same thing will keep things fresh. For example, some start of song phrases would be things like “let’s get into it” and “let’s see what happens” and “here we go”. Make them your voice, and don’t force yourself to be uncomfortable for the sake of uniqueness.

Everything in moderation, including moderation

Almost everything written above exists on a spectrum. You can be hype, calm, or somewhere in between. You can be analytical, reactive, or both. You can talk fast during gameplay and slow during breaks. These are guidelines meant to help you find your best position as a commentator, so feel free to break these rules, invent new ones, and experiment. We are here to have fun and to help other people have fun watching tournaments – so enjoy it!