Bracket
Run a knockout until one is left.
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Settle it the way a tournament settles it
A list of eight snacks, five-a-side teams, or thirty songs somebody insists are the best of the decade. Ranking all of them at once is hard and an argument nobody wins. Two at a time is easy. A knockout bracket is just that trick applied over and over: pair everything up, pick a winner from each pair, pair the winners, and keep going until one is left.
The result is not the same as the best thing on your list, and it is worth knowing that before you start. A knockout rewards whoever drew the kind half of the board. That is a feature at a games night and a problem at a five-a-side tournament, which is why the draw is seeded in the order you type and why there is a shuffle button for when the order should not be yours to choose.
How to use it
- Type your entrants into the box on the right, one per line or separated by commas.
- Shuffle the draw if the seeding should be random rather than the order you typed.
- Tap a name in each first-round match to send it through to the next round.
- Work left to right. Byes advance on their own and need no tap from you.
- Keep going until the final resolves and the champion is named at the top.
- Copy the share link at any point to hand the half-played board to somebody else.
About byes
Brackets want a power of two. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two: those are the only field sizes where every entrant plays in round one. Anything else leaves gaps, and each gap becomes a bye, which is a match its occupant wins by turning up. Eleven entrants need a sixteen-slot board, so five of them skip the opening round. They go to the names at the top of your list, spread so that no two byes ever meet, and they advance without asking you to tap a winner against nobody.
One loss or two
A knockout is brutal by design: a bad five minutes against the wrong opponent and the best thing on your list is out before anybody has seen it twice. Double elimination is the standard answer. A first loss drops you into a second board, the losers bracket, and you carry on there against everybody else who has lost once. Lose again and you are out, which is the whole rule: two losses, not one.
It roughly doubles the number of matches, so pick it when the tournament is the event rather than a way of choosing quickly. The losers bracket also takes a little reading, because who you meet there depends on which round you fell out of. The drop-ins are crossed on purpose so that losing to somebody does not put you straight back in front of them, which would make the second chance worth very little.
One entrant reaches the grand final having never lost. Beating them once is not enough: eliminating somebody on a single defeat in a format that promises two is the one thing this board will not do, so if the challenger wins the grand final it is played again, and the rematch decides it. The page says so above the match, and the reset sits there greyed out until it is actually needed.
Good uses
- A games night, where the bracket is the whole evening rather than a way of choosing one.
- A best-snack or best-biscuit showdown at work, which is the correct use of a Tuesday.
- Five-a-side, darts, table tennis, or anything where you need a board on a wall.
- Picking a film, a restaurant, or a playlist by making the group choose between two at a time.
- Narrowing a long shortlist down to something a meeting can actually discuss.
Changing your mind
Nothing on the board is locked. Tapping the other name in a match you have already decided replays the rest of the tournament from that point: anything downstream that depended on the old winner is cleared, and anything in the other half of the draw stays exactly as it was. That makes the bracket useful as a what-if as well as a record, because you can run the semi-final the other way round and see what it does to the final without starting again.
Questions people ask
- What happens when my number of entrants is not a power of two?
- The draw is padded up to the next power of two and the empty slots become byes. A bye is a free pass through the first round, and it goes to the entrants at the top of your list. Eleven entrants make a sixteen-slot board with five byes, so the first five names sit out round one.
- Why do the byes go to the names at the top?
- Because that is what a seeded draw does: the strongest entrants get the easiest start. If you would rather nobody had the advantage, press Shuffle the draw and the order, and with it the byes, is decided at random.
- Can two byes end up in the same match?
- No. There are always fewer byes than entrants, and the draw pairs the highest seed with the lowest, so every bye lands opposite a real name. You will never be asked to tap a winner between two empty slots.
- What is double elimination?
- One loss does not put you out. The first one drops you into a second board, the losers bracket, where you keep playing against everybody else who has lost once. Lose there and you are out for good. The winner of the losers bracket meets the one entrant who has not lost at all, in the grand final.
- Is the grand final played twice?
- Only if it has to be. The entrant coming out of the winners bracket has not lost a match all day, and knocking them out on one defeat would mean eliminating somebody on their first loss in a format whose whole promise is that it takes two. So if the losers-bracket finalist wins the grand final, the board resets and they have to do it again. Win the first one from the winners side and it ends there.
- Why do I not play the same person again straight away after losing?
- Because the drop-ins are crossed. Each losers round takes that round's fresh losers from the winners bracket in reversed or rotated order, rather than straight across, which is what would put you back in front of the person who just beat you. A deep rematch is possible late on, when there is nobody left who has not played somebody, but the early ones are designed out.
- What happens to a bye in double elimination?
- Nothing drops from it. A bye is not a match anybody lost, so it sends no competitor into the losers bracket, and the slot it would have filled is simply closed. The losers-bracket match it fed is then a free pass for whoever did drop into it.
- Can I record the scores?
- Yes, in the small boxes under each match, and only if you want to. They are entirely decorative: the score never decides anything, the tap above it does. That means you can record a match somebody won on penalties or on a countback without the bracket arguing with you, and leaving them all empty works exactly as it did before scores existed.
- What if I tap the wrong winner?
- Tap the other name. The board clears any later result that depended on the one you changed, because the person you had winning the final may no longer be in it. In double elimination that reaches both boards at once, since the loser of a winners match is somebody else's opponent a few rounds down the losers side. Results whose two names did not move are left alone, so you only lose what genuinely became untrue.
- How many entrants can I add?
- Thirty-two. That is five rounds and thirty-one matches, which is about as much as a room will sit through in one evening, and it is the widest board that still reads on a phone.
- Does my bracket get sent anywhere?
- No. Everything is worked out in your browser and nothing is stored on our servers. Copy share link puts the entrants and every result so far inside the link itself, so you can send the half-played bracket to someone else and they pick up where you left off.