How the bracket generator works

Paste one name per line and choose a format. The generator first works out the bracket size, which is the smallest power of two that fits your entrants (8, 16, 32 or 64). Any slots left over become byes: first-round positions with no opponent, where the entrant advances without playing. It then places entrants according to the seeding you picked, numbers every match in play order, and writes each later slot as a reference such as “Winner of M3”, so you can run the event from the printout without recalculating anything.

Every number in the output can be checked by hand. Single elimination always has one match fewer than entrants. Double elimination has two fewer than twice the entrants, plus the optional reset match. A round robin has N×(N−1)/2 matches. The table below shows what that means for common field sizes.

Single elimination, double elimination or round robin?

Single elimination is the fastest way to find a winner. One loss ends your tournament, so it is cheap in matches but harsh on players: half the field plays only one match. Because a single upset can knock out a favourite, seeding matters a lot here.

Double elimination gives every entrant a second life. Players who lose in the winners bracket drop into a losers bracket, and you are out after your second loss. Every entrant therefore plays at least two matches, and the final result is much less sensitive to one bad game. The price is about twice the matches and a longer schedule. The generator arranges the losers-bracket drop-ins so that, where the bracket allows it, a player who just dropped down does not immediately meet someone they already beat.

Round robin has everyone play everyone. It is the fairest format for small fields (up to about 8) and the most expensive: the match count grows with the square of the field. For bigger fields, organizers usually split entrants into groups, run a round robin in each and take the best few into a knockout bracket; you can estimate that with the tournament time estimator. If you have too many entrants for a round robin but want more games per player than a knockout gives, look at the Swiss system.

How byes are handled for non-powers of two

Most real events do not have exactly 8, 16 or 32 entrants. With 12 entrants the bracket has 16 slots and 4 byes, so four entrants skip round one and eight entrants play four matches in it. The total is still 11 matches, because byes are not matches. With seeded or random seeding, the byes go to the highest seeds, which is the standard way to reward the best-ranked entrants. Two byes never share a match, and a bye can only occur in the first round.

With as entered, your list order is respected instead. The byes are spread evenly across the round-one matches, so the bye winners do not all end up in the same half of the bracket. Pick this if you have already drawn your bracket by hand or want to control every pairing.

Seeding: seeded, as entered and random draw

Standard seeding pairs seed 1 with the last seed, seed 2 with the second last, and so on, arranged so that the top two seeds can only meet in the final, the top four only from the semifinals, and so forth. If the higher seeds win their matches, the bracket plays out as “1 against 2 in the final”. That is the point of seeding: it protects the best entrants from meeting each other early.

The random draw shuffles your list with a pseudo-random generator and then applies the same seeding. Each draw has a number stored in the share link, so the person you send the link to sees the same bracket rather than a new shuffle. That makes it repeatable, but it is not a cryptographic draw: for an event with serious prizes, do the draw in public, for example on a stream, and paste the result in as “As entered”.

Copying, printing and sharing

Copy as text gives you a plain match list you can paste into Discord, a forum post or a chat. Copy as CSV produces columns for stage, round, match, and both participants that open directly in a spreadsheet, which is handy for scheduling. Print hides everything except the bracket, and the share link stores your names and settings in the URL fragment so the same bracket reopens on any device.

Limits

The generator supports 2 to 64 entrants and produces the structure only: it does not record scores, pick a winner or seed from ratings. Double elimination needs at least 3 entrants. If you need to track results and keep standings, use the Swiss calculator for round-by-round results, or a tournament platform.