Well, beating the tournament mode is one of the fucking biggest challenges ever. Without slowly mastering the combat by playing the story mode it's near impossible to beat the tournament with any other character than the ogre or goblorg and even then it's still quite a challenge. What character are (or rather "were") you using anyway? The regular warrior I presume?

Believe me, it's possible to complete Tournament even with kobold! I've made it with axe-armed kobold, it was hard, but somehow funny.

Mantis is a killer character if you make custom moves. You can make such great moves which rip and tear.
The whole tournament is easily beatable with a well designed mantis.

I also just got stuck on this level. After all this years noone came up with some better advice than "it's doable"? I tried like 100 times, and sometimes I manage to kill an orc, but eventually ogre will hit me and... and you all know how it ends on this arena.
I'm looking for some general advice, so I could replay this mode with different characters. Right now I;m playing the female warrior with mace and shield.

Putting an Ogre on this level is just criminally unfair.. I've been at it for over an hour now with the default warrior and the closest I've come is the evil twin falling off the platform, then killing the orc - only to be punted into the ceiling and bouncing into the pit (at least it's funny to watch). I spent a few minutes just jumping around in a circle over the gaps to bait falls, but the ogre seemed content just walking around the centre taking swings at me.
The only thing that seems to even remotely work is just crouching and going in circles around the ogre and swinging wildly, although eventually I get sent flying.

Edit: I got sick of it after another hour or so and found a way to skip it. You can go to your "Die by the Sword\saves\Profilename" folder and edit tourney.dbt in notepad. Mine simply contained "the_hero 0 0 38 2", I changed 38 to 39 and viola, level skipped. I suppose you could change characters here too. Hopefully this saves someone a bit of frustration.

I'm stuck on it too. I had 3 situations that gave me some hopes for win - twice big fella felt to the pit, once I managed to cut his head off. Didn't matter in the end - some other always manages to kill me or I jump to the pit on my own :D Not giving up yet. But it is ridiculously hard - the only way to win is by accident... Oh well...

https://youtu.be/be2pRBPLaXM?list=PL5RNJdmY1bQEK7EIptXoyVOjCuw3dQ2dk

Finally done this! But judging by number of attempts and what you actually can see in the video, you just need to keep trying until luck is on your side.