4 team double elimination bracket
4 teams and two lives each. 6 matches in total — a winners bracket, the losers bracket that catches everyone it knocks out, and a grand final between the two survivors.
- Matches
- 6
- Everybody but the winner has to lose twice.
- Guaranteed matches
- 2
- Nobody goes home on one bad game.
- Brackets
- 2
- A winners bracket, a losers bracket, and a grand final between them.
- Roughly how long
- 1 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.
Why it is about twice the matches
Everybody except the winner has to lose twice, so a field of 4 produces roughly 6 matches against a straight knockout's 4. That is the whole trade: about double the court time, and almost no chance of the second-best team going home because of one bad draw in round one.
On two courts at 25 minutes a match that is the difference between a morning and most of a day. Worth checking against how long you actually have the hall for.
Everybody gets at least two matches
Losing the first one drops a team into the losers bracket rather than out of the building. For a 4-team field that is the cheapest guarantee of a real day out for everybody — the format is popular in esports for the fairness, and it works in a hall for the same reason plus one more: it keeps courts busy and teams in the building.
Common questions
How many matches in a 4 team double elimination?
6 — about 2 × 4 − 2, because everybody but the winner has to lose twice.
How many matches is everybody guaranteed?
Two. A team that loses its first match drops into the losers bracket and plays again there.