Group stage and knockout generator
Everyone gets a few guaranteed matches, the top of each group carries on, and the playoff seeds itself from the tables the moment they are final. What most one-day tournaments actually do.
- Groups
- 3
- 3 groups of 4
- Matches
- 24
- Group matches plus the playoff they feed.
- Guaranteed matches
- 3
- Before anybody can be knocked out.
- Roughly how long
- 5 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.
The playoff fills itself in
Twelve teams draws as 3 groups of 4. The bracket is drawn at the same time as the groups, with its positions labelled "1. A", "2. B" and so on, so the whole day is on the wall from the first whistle.
As each group finishes, the positions waiting on it resolve and real team names replace the labels. Nothing has to be re-entered and nobody has to redraw anything at the halfway point of the day, which is the point in a tournament when redrawing anything by hand goes wrong.
A provisional table never promotes anybody
A group table is provisional until every fixture in it is settled, and a playoff position waiting on that group will not fill until it is. Promoting a provisionally-first team into a bracket would be the worst bug this system could have — a team told they are through, playing a quarter-final, while a group match that changes the order is still being played on the next court.
The best third-placed teams
When the number of group winners and runners-up does not fill the bracket, the gap is closed by taking the best teams from the next place down, chosen across the groups rather than within one. That needs a table the group tables cannot produce: which of the third-placed teams were actually best.
It runs tier by tier — every group's winner, then every runner-up, then every third — so a runner-up never outranks a winner. Within a tier, results against anyone finishing below the smallest group's last place are disregarded, so teams out of a group of four and a group of three are compared over the same number of matches.
Common questions
How many groups should I have?
Groups of four or five are the sweet spot: three or four guaranteed matches each, and a table small enough to finish before the playoff needs it. Whistle.day defaults to pools of at most five and never fewer than two pools.
How many teams advance from each group?
Two by default, which is what fills a bracket cleanly from an even number of groups. You can take more, and you can top the bracket up with the best third-placed teams.
What decides the group tables?
Points, then head-to-head among the tied teams only, then score difference, then points scored. When a table needs more than points to rank, the criteria that separated it are printed underneath.