Double elimination bracket generator
Lose once and you drop into the losers bracket; lose twice and you are out. Nobody goes home on one bad game, and the day still ends with one winner.
- Matches
- 14
- 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
- 3 h 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.
Two brackets and a grand final
The winners bracket runs like an ordinary knockout. Everyone it eliminates drops into the losers bracket, which runs alongside it and eliminates them for good on a second defeat. The two survivors meet in a grand final.
The match count is the giveaway for how much longer this takes than a straight knockout: everybody but the winner has to lose twice, so it is roughly double. That is the price of the second life, and it is worth knowing before you commit a hall to it.
Why it is worth the extra time
A straight knockout can send the second-best team home in the first round because of one bad draw. Double elimination is the cheapest fix for that: it costs about twice the matches and it almost never produces a winner nobody believes in.
It is the default in esports for exactly this reason, and it works just as well in a hall — the losers bracket keeps courts busy and keeps teams in the building.
Byes here mean something different
A bye in a bracket is not a match and scores nothing — it is a free pass to the next round. A bye in a Swiss round is the opposite: it takes the points for a win, because otherwise sitting out sends whoever was the odd one out to the bottom of the table for something that was not their fault. They are the same record in the database and they mean opposite things, which is worth knowing if you ever look at the raw data.
Common questions
How many matches in a double elimination tournament?
Roughly 2 × teams − 2, because everybody except the winner has to lose twice. Eight teams is 14 matches against a straight knockout's 8.
Does the grand final have a bracket reset?
Not currently. The winners-bracket finalist and the losers-bracket finalist play one grand final and it decides the tournament.
How long does it take compared to a knockout?
About twice as long for the same field, which on two courts and a 25-minute slot is the difference between a morning and most of a day.