3 team single elimination bracket
3 teams, 2 matches, 2 rounds — Semi-finals, then Final. 3 is not a power of two, so the bracket is drawn at 4 and 1 team skip the first round.
- Matches
- 2
- Rounds
- 2
- Semi-finals → Final
- Byes
- 1
- 1 team go straight to round two — the bracket holds 4.
- Roughly how long
- 30 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.
Where the 1 bye go
A knockout bracket holds a power of two. 3 teams needs a bracket of 4, which leaves 1 position empty, and each empty position is a bye: a team that does not play in round one and enters in round two.
The byes go to the top of the draw — to the seeded teams. That is the convention, and it is also the only placement that does not distort the bracket: scattering them at random would hand a free round to whoever happened to land next to one.
Byes do not add matches. The 2 above is one match per eliminated team, and a team that skips round one has simply not played yet.
How the day runs
Semi-finals (1 match), 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 3 team knockout?
2. One for every team eliminated — 2 of them.
How many rounds for 3 teams?
2: Semi-finals, Final.
How many byes with 3 teams?
1. The bracket is drawn at 4 and the 1 spare position go to the top seeds, who enter in round two.