Draw a knockout tournament bracket

Seven players, one afternoon, single elimination — who plays whom? Generate a seeded bracket with byes placed correctly, or a shuffled draw.

Tools used in this guide

The job

Club nights, school events, office ping-pong — a knockout bracket answers "who plays next" in one picture. The fiddly part is placing byes so nobody waits unfairly and top seeds do not collide early; the tool does that layout.

How to do it

List entrants one per line in seed order — first line is the top seed. Tick shuffle if you want a random draw instead. Generate, and the bracket prints round by round: real matches show both names, byes are marked, and undecided slots show "to be decided".

Non-power-of-two counts get byes — 6 players on an 8-slot bracket means seeds 1 and 2 wait while 3–6 play round 1.
Standard seeding keeps seed 1 and seed 2 apart until the final.
Copy the bracket as text to paste into a chat or print.

Worked example

Five entrants on an 8-slot bracket: seeds 1, 2, and 3 draw first-round byes, and the only opening match is seed 4 versus seed 5. Round 2 then pairs seed 1 against the 4/5 winner and seed 2 against seed 3.

Limits

3–32 entrants, single elimination only — no consolation bracket, no scores, no re-seeding mid-event. The bracket is a draw, not a tracker; write results on the printed copy or a scoreboard.