15 team single elimination bracket
15 team bracket with byes: 15 matches, 4 rounds, and 1 first-round bye. Because 15 is not a power of two, the bracket is drawn at 16 with 1 team advancing directly to the quarter-finals, while the other 14 teams play in round one.
Updated
- Matches
- 15
- Including the third-place match.
- Rounds
- 4
- Round of 16 → Quarter-finals → Semi-finals → Final
- Byes
- 1
- 1 team go straight to round two — the bracket holds 16.
- Roughly how long
- 3 h 15 min on 2 courts
- Allowing 25 minutes a match, courts running in parallel.
Free, and there is no account to make first. About a minute to the QR code.
How byes work for 15 teams: 1 team gets a first-round bye
In a 15 team bracket with byes, 15 is not a power of two, so the draw expands to the next power of two (16 slots). That leaves exactly 1 empty slot, which become 1 first-round bye.
Who gets the byes? The top seeds (seed #1) receive a first-round bye and skip straight to the quarter-finals. The remaining 14 teams (seeds #2 through #15) play in the opening round (7 matches).
The 7 winners from round one then join the 1 rested seed in the quarter-finals, completing a full 8-team second round with zero further byes.
Placing byes with the top seeds is standard tournament practice: it rewards regular season ranking and prevents distortion of the draw. Total matches: 15 (including the third-place match).
How the day runs
Round of 16 (7 matches), then Quarter-finals (4 matches), then Semi-finals (2 matches), then Final (1 match).
A knockout round cannot start until the one before it has finished, so the finish time above is optimistic in a way a round robin's is not: the last few rounds run on fewer and fewer courts. Two courts is assumed; a single court roughly doubles it.
Before it is played
The whole bracket exists from the moment you draw it. Positions that do not have a team yet carry the label the server wrote ("Winner QF1" and so on), so it can go on a projector on the morning of the tournament and be read as a plan rather than a grid of blanks.
Common questions
How many matches is a 15 team knockout?
15. One for every team eliminated: 14 of them, plus a third-place match.
How many rounds for 15 teams?
4: Round of 16, Quarter-finals, Semi-finals, Final.
How do byes work in a 15 team bracket?
A 15 team bracket is drawn on a 16-team grid. Exactly 1 teams get a first-round bye (top seeds 1–1) straight to the quarter-finals, while the other 14 teams play 7 opening matches.
Who gets the byes in a 15 team tournament?
The top 1 seeds (seeds 1 through 1) receive the first-round byes to reward seeding and maintain bracket balance.