Tournament Bracket Generator
Single-elimination brackets with seeding and byes; click winners through.
About this tool
Enter teams or players one per line in seed order (or press Shuffle for a random draw) and create the bracket. Click a name to send it through to the next round; changing an earlier result clears later ones. The champion appears at the end, and the bracket prints for the wall. It's saved in this browser.
Seeding, byes and fair brackets
A knockout bracket needs a power-of-two number of slots — 4, 8, 16, 32 — so with 7 entrants there are 8 slots and one bye. Standard seeding places entrants so the strongest meet as late as possible: in an 8-slot bracket the order is 1 v 8, 4 v 5, 2 v 7 and 3 v 6, which means the top two seeds can only meet in the final and the top four only in the semi-finals, and byes go to the top seeds. That is how tennis, football cups and esports draws work. If you don't have rankings, shuffle for a random draw, which is fairer than a hand-picked one. Number of rounds is log₂ of the bracket size — 3 for 8, 4 for 16 — and a field of n entrants always plays n − 1 matches to find a champion. This tool is single elimination only; for leagues where everyone plays everyone, the round robin scheduler builds the fixtures. The team generator splits players into teams, the random picker makes draws, the scoreboard keeps score, and the coin flip settles who goes first.
Frequently asked questions
How do byes work in a bracket?
When the number of entrants isn't a power of two, the top seeds get a bye — they go straight into the second round. With 7 entrants, seed 1 gets the one bye.
How many games are in a single-elimination tournament?
Always one fewer than the number of entrants: 16 teams play 15 matches, because every match eliminates exactly one team.
Can I randomise the draw?
Yes — press Shuffle seeds to randomise the order, then the bracket is built from the shuffled list.
Is my bracket saved?
Yes, in this browser's local storage, so you can update it as results come in. It is never uploaded.