Variant Tournament Help

How to run an unsponsored live variant tournament.

This will be a simple guide, just touching the basic things you need to think about when contemplating organising a variant chess tournament.

It might be filled with European/Dutch bias, please leave a note for others if you see anything that might not work in your area.

1- A location to play
Very simple, people need to physically sit somewhere to play a live tournament, preferably across from one another. Using a public option (community center) or other non profit option would be your cheapest bet. There will be costs organising a first tournament and anything to get the cost down will benefit.
A simple way to try to get the cost down is contacting local chess clubs and check if they can help you out using their facilities. It's very unlikely that they'll pay a lot of money to play every single week or that they'll pay a lot for organising their tournaments. So, contact all chessclubs in your neighborhood and see which ones seems to be the best option for you.
Otherwise, a community center or other non-profit option will also be okay. This will mean that you need to get all the chess materials from somewhere.

2- A date.
If you hope to get people over from further away, then getting a date as quickly as possible is wise. Some people would love to come to your tournament, but they need to plan to come over. The sooner they know when it will happen, the bigger the changes that they might come.

3- Advertise
The best way to reach players is by advertising during tournaments. Unfortunately, Lichess moderators can muzzle you for doing so since it is not allowed. That leaves blog posts, groups and messages from people that have a lot of followers.
Make sure your national chess federation accepts the tournament. If they do it should be visible on your national chess tournament website and will appear on websites like this:
https://chess-calendar.eu/
Email chess clubs. They might have been playing a variant and could be postively surprised there's actually a tournament. When we did this, some chess clubs advertised it on their website.
Hang up posters (if they let you) in chess pubs.

4- A balanced budget.
Now that everything is sorted, you need to calculate what it will cost.
First decider: Do you let the players pay for all the cost or do you cover some of the cost yourself?
Do you need to rent chess materials or are they covered in the venue?
Do you have to supply lunch or is it covered in the venue?
Do you award prizes to the players and what do they cost?
Players need to come over to your tournament and pay for lodgings, travel, food and drinks etc. If you ask them to pay $100, some might not come over.
Second decider: Calculate how many players you need to at least break even with a fee amount of X.

5- Volunteers.
Organising gets way easier if you have the right and motivated volunteers.
You can't oversee everything all the time.
From a personal perspective, I have had players ask for help buying train tickets for the way home, help with taxis and other player requests that needed to be solved with someone leaving the tournament to help them.
There might be a lot of work setting things up, cleaning things up. People have questions during the tournament and things might not work as you thought it would (WIFI not working, food problems, things you generally didn't think about).
Either you take care of it and volunteers take over the general tournament workings or the other way around.
Have a small, dedicated team of people who help you out. Not too many, because if things do go well, they will feel useless.

6- Tournament preparations.
There's some basic (logical) things that needs to be organised and tested.
Tournament software. From our own experience, a Swiss system with more rounds than players is not possible with normal Swiss tournament software. So, check for that.
Tables need to be big enough and numbered. Match sheets need to be printed and individual score sheets. Pens need to be provided and other small materials.
Someone has to be the main referee.
It's a logical list that needs to be checked. Challenges can arise because of the location of the venue or because of the layout.

Better to talk about all these things once too often and never assume the other person will take care of things.