Skip to content
BracketPrintout

5 team double elimination bracket

Five entrants, two lives each: 4 matches in the winners bracket, 3 in the losers bracket over 4 rounds, and a grand final. Type your names over the sample ones and print both trees.

5 entrants in a 8-slot double-elimination draw: 4 winners-bracket matches, 3 losers-bracket matches across 4 losers rounds, and the grand final — 8 in all, or 9 if the bracket is reset. 3 byes to the top 3 seeds, which leaves 3 losers-bracket boxes nobody can ever fill.

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

Winners bracket

Quarter-finals

  1. Ashford
    Bye
  2. Dunmore
    Eastfield
  3. Bye
    Castleton
  4. Bye
    Bellweather

Semi-finals

  1. Ashford
     
  2. Castleton
    Bellweather

Final

  1.  
     

Undefeated

  1.  

Losers bracket

Losers round 1

  1. Bye
     
  2. Bye
    Bye

Losers round 2Semi-finals losers drop in

  1.  
     
  2. Bye
     

Losers semi-final

  1.  
     

Losers finalWinners final loser drops in

  1.  
     

One loss

  1.  

Grand final, and the reset

  1.  
     
  2.  
     

Top box: the entrant who arrives undefeated. Bottom box: the one who arrives out of the losers bracket, already carrying a loss. The second match is played only if the undefeated entrant loses the first — at that point they have lost once, and one loss does not eliminate anybody in this tournament.

What 5 teams look like in two brackets

Five entrants sit in an 8-slot draw, so the winners bracket runs 3 rounds — quarter-finals, semi-finals and final — and the losers bracket runs 4 behind it. The sheet carries 7 winners boxes and 6 losers boxes, plus the grand final that joins them.

Everybody except the champion has to lose twice, which fixes the total at 8: 4 winners-bracket matches, 3 losers-bracket matches and one grand final. Single elimination for the same 5 entrants is 4, so the second chance costs 4 extra matches. That ratio holds at every size and it is the only honest way to budget the day.

Three of the 8 slots are empty, so three of the 5 entrants skip round one. They are the top three seeds, because a bye is one fewer match to win and that belongs to whoever earned the seeding. On a single-elimination sheet that is the end of the matter. Here it also punches three holes in the losers bracket, which is the part nobody expects.

The 5-team losers bracket, round by round

The 4 losers rounds are 2, 2, 1, 1 boxes wide — 6 boxes in all, of which 3 are played at 5 entrants. They come in pairs: an odd-numbered round takes a fresh batch of beaten entrants from the winners bracket, and the round after it folds the survivors together. Beaten entrants therefore arrive on a timetable — semi-final losers join at losers round 2 and the beaten winners finalist joins at the losers final.

Losers round 2 is 2 boxes wide and it is the one that goes wrong. Drop winners match 1 into losers box 1 and an entrant meets the person who has just knocked them out about half the time, which is precisely what the second life was for. The losers are dropped in reversed here instead, and at 5 entrants that makes the rematch impossible in that round.

Three of the 6 losers boxes cannot be played at all. One of them has nobody on either side and drops out of the tournament entirely: 5 entrants in an 8-slot draw simply do not generate enough first-round losers to fill the opening losers round. The rest are walkovers, marked as such.

Running a 5-team double elimination

8 matches at a quarter of an hour each is about 2 hours of court time. On one court that is a single evening; the losers bracket is where the time goes, because 3 of the 8 matches happen in it and none of them can start until the winners round above has finished.

Decide before anybody plays whether the grand final can be reset. If it can, the schedule is 8 matches with a 9th held in reserve. If it cannot, an entrant can win this tournament having lost once, against somebody who has lost nothing — defensible, but only if it was said at the start rather than after the 8th match has gone the wrong way.

7 winners boxes above, 6 losers boxes below, and the grand final at the end — 14 boxes for 5 entrants, of which 8 are matches somebody actually plays. At 8 slots the whole tournament fits one A4 sheet in landscape at a size people can write in, which is the main reason double elimination gets run at all at this scale.

Common questions

How many matches in a 5 team double elimination bracket?

8, or 9 if the grand final is reset. 4 of them are in the winners bracket and 3 in the losers bracket, because every entrant but the champion has to lose twice and 5 entrants therefore absorb 8 losses.

How many rounds is a 5 team double elimination tournament?

3 winners rounds and 4 losers rounds, then the grand final — 8 matches for 5 entrants. The losers bracket needs roughly twice as many rounds because it folds in a fresh batch of beaten entrants after every winners round: semi-final losers join at losers round 2 and the beaten winners finalist joins at the losers final.

Where do the byes go in a 5 team double elimination bracket?

To the top three of the 5, the same as single elimination — but with a second consequence here. Three of the 6 losers boxes then have no loser coming, because a walkover produces none, so they are marked unplayable on the printed sheet rather than left looking live.

Every size

Every double-elimination size

The other tools