Tournament Bracket Generator

How to use

1. Put your teams or players in the box, one per line. Anything from 2 to 64 lines works; empty lines are ignored.
2. Leave Random seeding ticked for a fair draw, or untick it to keep your own order — see the seeding section below for what that order does.
3. Press Build bracket. The rounds appear side by side, labelled Round 1, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Final, and byes are already advanced.
4. As matches finish, click the winner's name in the match. It turns green and drops into the next round; the trophy line shows the champion once the final is decided.
5. Clicked the wrong name? Click the other one in the same match — later rounds that no longer make sense are cleared automatically. Copy bracket puts the whole thing on your clipboard as text for Discord.

Bracket size, byes and the number of matches

A single-elimination bracket always rounds up to a power of two. Eleven teams go into a 16-slot bracket, and the five empty slots become byes — free passes into round two. The number of matches, on the other hand, never depends on the bracket size: every match eliminates exactly one team, so N teams always play N−1 matches.

Byes go to the top lines of your list, so with random seeding on they land on random teams, and with it off you decide who gets the free pass. A bye is a real advantage — the team skips a match — which is why organisers usually hand them to the highest seeds or draw for them in public.

Seeding: random draw or your own order

With Random seeding ticked, the list is shuffled first (same cryptographic shuffle used by the rest of our randomizers), then paired. That is the right setting for a community cup where nobody has a ranking yet, and it is the setting that keeps arguments out of the draw.

Untick it and the pairing follows your list exactly: the first line meets the last line, the second meets the second-to-last, and so on. With eight teams that gives 1–8, 2–7, 3–6, 4–5, which is the classic "strongest against weakest" first round.

One detail worth knowing before you rely on it: neighbouring matches meet in the next round. So lines 1 and 2 of your list would collide in the semifinal, not the final. If you want your two strongest teams to meet only in the final, put the second-strongest in the middle of the list — the fourth line in an eight-team bracket, the eighth line in a sixteen-team one. Or just leave random seeding on and let the draw decide.

Running an evening tournament in CS2, Valorant or Free Fire

The bracket takes a minute. What actually decides whether the event finishes is how long one match lasts multiplied by the number of rounds — matches inside a round run in parallel if you have enough servers or rooms.

Times are rough and depend on skill level, overtime and how long the lobby takes to fill; treat them as planning numbers, not promises. Three practical rules from small cups: run every round as a best-of-one except the final, keep a five-minute buffer between rounds for screenshots and disputes, and post the updated bracket after each round so nobody has to ask who they play next. The Copy bracket button gives you the text list of every round for exactly that.

When the team count is awkward

Five, six, eleven, thirteen — real sign-ups rarely land on a power of two. Three ways to deal with it, all of which work with this tool:

• Let it give byes. Simplest option: build the bracket and the extra slots become free passes. Fair as long as the byes are drawn randomly or announced in advance.
• Play a qualifier first. With 11 teams, play three qualifier matches between the six lowest-ranked entries, then paste the remaining eight names and build a clean bracket with no byes at all.
• Add a filler entry. If someone can play twice or a coach can stand in, an extra line removes a bye and gives everyone a real first-round match.

For an odd number of players in a school class, the bye approach is usually the calmest: build with random seeding, show the screen, and the free pass is visibly not a favour to anyone.

The five rules to announce before the first match

Almost every argument in a small cup is about something nobody wrote down. The bracket is the easy part; post these lines next to it and the evening runs itself.

Two more things are worth deciding while nothing is at stake. Name one admin whose word settles disputes, and say in advance what happens to a match interrupted by a disconnect — replay the round, replay the map, or count it as it stood. Rules invented in the middle of a semifinal are the ones players remember a year later.

If a prize is involved, write down how it is split before sign-ups close. A cup that ends in a spreadsheet argument is remembered as a bad cup, however clean the bracket looked.

What makes ours different

• Up to 64 entries, byes and rounds calculated for you, with no account or sign-up.
• Cryptographically random seeding — the same rejection-sampled shuffle as our other randomizers, not a rough Math.random() sort.
• Clickable winners with automatic correction: change an early result and the impossible later rounds clear themselves.
• Copy bracket exports every round as plain text, ready to paste into a Discord channel or a chat.
• Works on a phone — the bracket scrolls sideways, so you can run the cup from the same device you play on.

What it is not: this is a single-elimination bracket only. There is no double elimination, no group stage, no round robin, no score entry and no login, so nothing is saved — pressing Build bracket again starts a fresh draw, and reloading the page clears the results. Copy the text after each round if you need a record.

Privacy

The bracket is built and updated entirely in your browser. Team names, seeding and results are never sent to a server, nothing is stored, and no one else can open your bracket by link. That also means the tab is your only copy — press Copy bracket to save the state before you close it.

FAQ