Single elimination bracket generator
Lose once and you are out. The quickest way to a winner, and the least playing time for whoever draws badly. Any number of teams — the bracket is sized up to the next power of two and the byes are handed out for you.
- Matches
- 8
- Including the third-place match.
- Rounds
- 3
- Quarter-finals → Semi-finals → Final
- Byes
- 0
- 8 is a power of two, so nobody sits out round one.
- Roughly how long
- 1 h 45 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.
Byes, without the arithmetic
A knockout bracket holds a power of two — 4, 8, 16, 32 — and hardly any tournament has exactly that many teams. The difference is made up with byes: teams that skip the first round and enter in the second.
You do not have to work out how many. Enter twelve teams and the bracket is drawn at sixteen with four byes, placed so the seeded teams get them, which is the convention and also the only placement that does not distort the draw.
Every cell is readable before it is played
A bracket drawn on Monday for a tournament played on Saturday is mostly empty, and the empty half is what people look at. Every unfilled position carries the label the server wrote for it — "Winner QF1", "1. A", "Bye" — so the bracket reads as a plan rather than as a grid of blanks.
The same is true on the projector and on the phone view. A match with an unresolved side renders as text with those labels and no affordance at all, because it is waiting for somebody rather than refusing to work.
Third place, if you want it
A third-place match shares a round with the final but is not part of the tree, which is why it is counted separately in the match total above. It is on by default because most one-day tournaments play it — one more match, and two teams who would otherwise have finished their day on a loss get another game.
Common questions
How many matches in a single elimination bracket?
One per team eliminated, so teams − 1, plus one more if you play a third-place match. Byes do not add matches — a team that skips round one simply has not played yet.
What if I do not have a power-of-two number of teams?
That is the normal case and it is handled. The bracket is drawn at the next power of two and the spare positions become byes.
Can I seed the bracket?
Yes. Teams carry a seed number and the draw lays them out so the top seeds cannot meet before the final — and so the byes go to the top of the draw.