Tournament Bracket Maker

A tournament bracket is the visual tree that tracks a knockout tournament from the first round to the final. Each match's winner advances one slot to the right; the losers' line ends there (single elimination) or drops into a losers' bracket (double elimination). The shape is a binary tree, which is why bracket sizes round to powers of 2 — 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 — and odd team counts use byes for the top seeds.

Single elimination: one loss and you're out. N teams play N − 1 matches and the tournament finishes fast — usually a single day or weekend. Double elimination: every team has to lose twice. The winners' bracket runs like a single-elim, and losers drop into a parallel losers' bracket; the surviving LB team meets the WB winner in the Grand Final. Double elim takes about 2N − 2 matches but is more forgiving — the eventual champion can lose once and still win it all.

Standard cross-bracket seeding pairs the strongest team with the weakest in round one (1 vs N), the second-strongest with the second-weakest (2 vs N-1), and balances the halves so the top two seeds can't meet until the final. The bracket generator does this for you when the team list is in seed order (1 at top, N at bottom). For an unseeded draw, shuffle the list before generating.

A bye is a free pass through round one. If you have 6 teams, the bracket rounds up to 8 slots and gives byes to the top 2 seeds. With 12 teams, 4 byes go to seeds 1 through 4. The total match count drops accordingly, but the bracket shape stays clean. The generator places the byes automatically.

Consolation is a side bracket for teams that lose in the main bracket. The simplest version (third-place playoff) is just one match between the two semifinal losers. Full consolation runs every losing team through a parallel bracket so each team plays the same number of games; its winner is 3rd place. Double elimination is structurally similar but the LB winner meets the WB winner in a Grand Final — they can still win the whole tournament.

Yes. Hit Print in the editor and the bracket renders one-page wallchart-style; print to PDF from any modern browser. Save to your dashboard if you want to reopen it during the tournament. The print layout uses high-contrast lines and clean typography so it photocopies well for office-pool handouts.

Yes — every format, every team count, every print, every export. No watermark. Sign in if you want to save brackets to your dashboard and reopen them later. Sharing a bracket link doesn't require either party to sign in.

Practically up to 64 teams for single elimination — that's the standard March Madness shape — and 32 for double elimination. Larger brackets work but get hard to print cleanly on one page. For leagues, the round-robin generator handles up to 24+ teams comfortably.