Multi-stage tournament builder

Stages feed each other by position, not by name

A later stage can be seeded from an earlier one's tables: take the top two of every group, or the top four of a Swiss, and the positions in the next stage carry labels until the tables that fill them are final.

Because the wiring is by position rather than by team, the whole tournament can be drawn before a ball is hit. The bracket is on the wall from the start with "1. A" and "Winner SF1" in it, and it fills in as the day goes.

Corrections propagate the whole way down

Editing a score hours later reruns the entire chain: the winner, the tables, the positions those tables feed, and the bracket cells downstream of them. There is no separate repair step for the normal case, because the normal case is that somebody typed a 2 where they meant a 3 and noticed at the trophy table.

A team who turns up late

Somebody arriving after the draw is the normal case rather than the exception, and it is handled: a late team can be added to a group or a Swiss field, and a bracket nobody has played yet is redrawn around them.

The one case with no answer is a knockout that has already started. The ninth team is not one of eight positions decided on Friday, and rewriting the draw around them would rewrite a match that has been played — so at that point they are genuinely too late.

What it will not do yet

A bracket topped up with the best third-placed teams can draw two teams from the same group against each other, because which groups those teams come from is not known until the groups have been played. Competitions that care fix it with a published table of every possible combination.

Common questions