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BracketPrintout

Tournament bracket generator

Type the entrants, choose seeded or random, and print. Byes go to the top seeds, the draw is laid out so the top two can only meet in the final, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

8 entrants in a 8-slot draw: 3 rounds, 7 matches, and no byes, because the field is already a power of two.

Check this before you rely on it. This bracket generator is provided free and without warranty, and its results are not professional advice.

The bracket

Quarter-finals

  1. Ashford
    Halstead
  2. Dunmore
    Eastfield
  3. Fernhill
    Castleton
  4. Granton
    Bellweather

Semi-finals

  1.  
     
  2.  
     

Final

  1.  
     

Winner

  1.  

The seeding order, and why it is not 1 against 2

A seeded draw is not simply the list in order. It is arranged so that the two best entrants can only meet in the final, the best four only in the semi-finals, the best eight only in the quarters — which is the entire point of seeding, and it is the part most bracket generators get wrong.

For sixteen entrants the slot order is 1, 16, 8, 9, 4, 13, 5, 12, 11, 6, 14, 3, 10, 7, 15, 2. Seed 1 plays seed 16, seed 8 plays seed 9, and the halves are arranged so 1 and 2 sit at opposite ends of the sheet. Every governing body uses this order, and it is generated here by doubling rather than looked up in a table — a table is right for one size and quietly wrong for every other, which is exactly the bug in generators that claim to support any number of teams.

If you would rather not seed at all, switch it off and the draw is shuffled. Random is the honest answer for a club night or an office competition where nobody has a ranking and pretending otherwise just starts an argument.

Byes, and who should get them

A field that is not a power of two does not fill the draw, and the empty slots are byes. Two of them for six entrants, four for twelve, eight for twenty-four — always the next power of two minus the field.

They belong to the top seeds. A bye is an advantage — one fewer match, more rest, a shorter route — and in a seeded draw an advantage belongs to whoever earned the seeding. Giving byes to the bottom of the draw, which some generators do because it is easier to code, rewards being the weakest entrant.

A bye is also a real slot rather than a deleted match. Removing it would renumber everything after it and leave a bracket that cannot be printed as a tree, which is why the sheet shows the empty box and carries the name straight through to the second round.

What comes out of the printer

The bracket, edge to edge, with the page furniture removed: no header, no navigation, no advertisement, no URL across the top. A sixteen-team bracket fits one sheet in landscape; thirty-two needs two, or one at a smaller size.

Names are printed into the boxes if you supplied them and the boxes are left empty if you did not, so the same page produces a filled draw and a blank sheet to fill in by hand at a table.

There is no PDF library on this site. The browser already has a better one — "Save as PDF" is a destination in its own print dialogue — and adding a second would cost every visitor several hundred kilobytes to do the same job worse.

Common questions

How do you make a tournament bracket?

Work out the next power of two above your field — that is the size of the draw — then place the entrants in seeding order and fill the remaining slots with byes. This page does all three, and prints the result.

How many matches are in a knockout tournament?

Always one fewer than the number of entrants. Every match eliminates exactly one, and all but the winner must be eliminated, so sixteen teams is fifteen matches however the byes fall.

Who gets a bye in a tournament?

The top seeds, in order. A bye is one fewer match to win, so in a seeded draw it belongs to whoever earned the seeding — giving byes to the bottom of the draw rewards being the weakest entrant.

Every size

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