tarcellius: Welcome to the site. I just sent you a private message with some pointers. Answer back if you have any doubts.

tarcellius: Welcome to BrainKing! I´ll try to help you.
Stairs is only for paid memberships.
As free user (Brain Pawn) you have a limit of 20 games at the same time. The limit of the tournaments is one for you.
You can accept a game in the section "Waiting games" or you can put your own game in the section "New game"
For getting a rating you need to finish 4 games of one type, at least.
Read the FAQ section, you´ll find an interesting information there.

Matarilevich: your allowed to play one stairs as normal member

Matarilevich: Thanks for the welcome message and the help. I was able figure out a few things with pauloaguia's help. My remaining confusion lies with the available tournaments. So many options! Is there not a standard "September" tournament or the like? Why so many competing tournaments on the same site? How should I decide which to play?

tarcellius: Yes, the many options of tournaments can be both a good & bad thing. The bad, which you already pointed out is it is there are many many choices.

The good is that you can almost always find a tournament which will fit your needs. (And if you did not know, paying members of rooks & above are able to create any new tournaments.)

For a pawn with limits, you are limited to 1 tournament at a time - so you may want to look for tournaments with lower time limits, or tournaments that do not let players take vacation days (tournaments with red or green dots). If you get in a tournament where another player takes A LONG time making moves, you will be stuck in the tournament and unable to join another tournament.

Also there are different time limits like the Fisher clock games - where the important thing to know is the "BONUS" time - the bonus time will ALWAYS be at least the minimum time you have to make a move. So if a bonus is .1, it can cause your games to time out. But if you know you will sign in at least once a day, then a bonus of 1 (day) will always allow you time to make moves without timing out.

So for a new users, the best would be to go to the tournament page, search (filter) for the game you want to play - then find a tournament which will start some-what soon that has time limits which fit your need and give it a try.

There are also many discussion boards that cover all the games, and many different topics (like a touraments board) which will always get you answers to your questions.