From a pile of players to a champion.

Create the tournament

A name is the only thing you have to decide. The three other choices all have sensible defaults, but they're worth understanding, because two of them lock once you draw teams.

Public or private

Public tournaments are listed on the home page for anyone to follow. Private ones are unlisted and reachable only by their link — though anyone holding that link can watch. Changeable at any time.

Blind draw or direct entry

Blind draw means players sign up as individuals and get randomly paired into teams. Direct entry means you type in each team yourself, partners already decided. The player sign-up link only works with blind draw — there's no pool of unpaired players for a walk-up to join otherwise.

Automatic, manual or pool play seeding

Automatic seeds teams for you at the draw and starts play immediately. Manual gives you a drag-and-drop ladder to arrange first. Pick manual if you know who the strong teams are and want them apart in the bracket. Pool play has every team play 2 to 5 games first, with no rematches, and seeds the bracket from the standings: win percentage, then point differential. Every team gets more games, and the seeds are earned. Pool play is a paid-plan feature.

Single or double elimination

Single elimination is one loss and you're out. Double elimination gives every team a second chance: your first loss drops you into a losers bracket, and only a second knocks you out. It's kinder to a team that draws the eventual champion early, at the cost of roughly twice as many games. Double elimination is a paid-plan feature, and unlike the other choices here it's locked once the bracket is generated — the bracket's whole shape depends on it.

Board assignments

Tell Bracketway how many boards you have, and each game goes to the next free board as soon as one opens up. The bracket and TV view show who's on which board and who's up next, so players know where to go without asking. Staff can move a game to a different board, and you can change the count mid-event. Not playing on boards? Call them courts, lanes, tables, pits or fields instead. Board assignments are a paid-plan feature.

Get your players in

Type them in one at a time, or open the tournament's sign-up link — there's a QR code for it — and let people add themselves from their phones while you're still setting up.

Self sign-ups land as pending and don't join the roster until you approve them, so a stray scan or a joker typing nonsense never quietly ends up in your bracket. You'll want an even number of players, four at minimum.

Draw the teams

One button pairs every approved player at random into two-person teams. If you chose automatic seeding, this also seeds them, builds the bracket, and starts play in a single step. If you chose manual, you get the ladder to reorder first.

Don't like the pairings? Redraw them as many times as you want, right up until you generate the bracket.

The bracket gets built

Your teams get slotted into the nearest bracket that fits them — 8 teams into 8 slots, 9 teams into 16. In single elimination, losing once ends your run.

In double elimination the same tree becomes the winners bracket, and a second losers bracket runs alongside it collecting everyone knocked out of the first. The two survivors meet in a grand final. If the team coming up from the losers bracket wins it, both sides have one loss each and a single deciding rematch is played.

When the count isn't a clean power of two, the leftover slots become byes: the teams facing them advance automatically without playing a first-round match. That's normal and it's why a 9-team tournament shows fewer matches than you might expect — a bye is a free pass, not a game.

Score it as you play

Tap in each match's score as it finishes. The winner advances to the next round on its own — you never move anyone by hand — and the public bracket updates for everyone watching the moment you save.

Players who gave an email address when they signed up can get results mailed to them as rounds complete. It's opt-in on their end: they confirm once by tapping a link, and can unsubscribe from any message after that.

Running the scores is its own screen, too — it lists just the matches that can be played right now, so whoever's keeping score isn't hunting through a whole bracket on their phone between games.

Put it on the wall

Open the bracket on any TV, streaming stick, or laptop plugged into a screen and switch on TV mode: the site's own furniture disappears and the bracket scales up to fill the display, refreshing itself as scores land. No app, no cast, nothing to install — it's a web page, so bookmark it once and the screen looks after itself for the rest of the day.

For everyone not standing in front of that screen, print a sign. Bracketway makes you a full-page QR sheet — one to follow the bracket from a phone, one to sign up — ready to print or save as a PDF.

Someone wins

Score the final and the tournament closes itself out, champion and all. It stays up afterwards — the bracket link keeps working, so people can go back and argue about the semifinal for as long as they like.