Tournament Bracket Generator

How byes are handled

A single-elimination bracket needs a power of two - 4, 8, 16, 32 - so that every round halves cleanly. With six entrants, two of them have to skip the first round.

Those free passes are called byes, and where you put them matters. Bunching them at the top of the draw makes one half of the bracket much easier than the other. This spreads them across the draw so the advantage is distributed, and marks clearly who advances without playing.

Random seeding versus ranked seeding

This tool seeds at random, which is the right choice for a casual competition where nobody has a record yet and the point is that nobody can complain about the draw.

Serious competitions seed by ranking instead, deliberately putting the top two entrants in opposite halves so they can only meet in the final. That produces a better final and a less interesting first round. If you have rankings and care about the final, seed by hand. If you do not, random is both fairer and more fun.

Reading the bracket

Matches are numbered down the list. The winners of match 1 and match 2 meet in the next round, then 3 and 4, and so on. Work down in pairs and the whole tree follows from the first round.

Proving the draw

Every bracket comes with a receipt recording the entrant list and the seed. Share it with the draw and anyone can reproduce the same bracket, which settles the question of whether the organiser gave themselves a soft first round. How the receipts work.

For group stages rather than a knockout, the team generator splits a field into pools.